INTRODUCTION:
Public health research and practice increasingly emphasise equity, participation, and the inclusion of lived experience. However, many commonly used assessment and consultation methods rely heavily on language and assume shared literacy, cultural frames, and conceptual understandings. These assumptions can unintentionally limit participation and obscure nuanced understandings of people’s health behaviours and the social and structural influences shaping everyday life. This presentation introduces exploratory visuals as an equity-oriented elicitation tool and methodological approach designed to address this gap and support community-centred public health practice.

METHODS:
Exploratory visuals consist of curated sets of images representing intuitively understood concepts. Used within facilitated settings they support reflection, dialogue, and meaning making by inviting participants to select and interpret images in relation to their own preferences and experiences. This process enables the synthesis of tacit knowledge and supports the emergence of priorities, values, attitudes, and needs. As a low-burden and engaging approach, they reduce dependence on language and support participation across diverse ages, abilities, and linguistic backgrounds.

RESULTS:
Exploratory visual elicitation generated rich insights into how individuals and communities understand complex and multifaceted concepts, including health behaviours, wellbeing, safety, risk, and belonging and how beliefs, practices and circumstances influence behaviour. The method revealed culturally influenced meanings, relational dynamics and forms of agency shaped by structural conditions that were not revealed via written language.

CONCLUSIONS:
Exploratory visuals align with social determinants of health frameworks, equity-oriented approaches, community-centred practice, and principles of cultural safety. They support participants to express layered, context dependent understandings such as how inequities are lived and negotiated, including trade-offs under constrain. In doing so, exploratory visuals function as an accessible and easy to use method of participatory elicitation that strengthens community consultation, planning, and intervention design by grounding public health action in how complexity is actually experienced and understood across diverse contexts.