Michael Arnold Mages
In 2025, during Boston’s second Participatory Budgeting (PB) cycle, residents participated in a proposal development phase, requiring residents to evaluate and prioritise over 960 eligible ideas submitted by fellow community members. A central design challenge emerged: how to structure forums so that residents would evaluate ideas based on equity and community impact rather than their pre-existing advocacy commitments. Drawing on Rawls’ concept of the veil of ignorance, the design team and the Office of Participatory Budgeting implemented a random assignment protocol that directed participants to deliberate on topic areas they had not necessarily submitted ideas about or previously advocated for. This structural intervention aimed to distribute decision-making power more equitably and prevent organised interest groups from concentrating influence at individual tables. During the forums, the mechanism produced visible tension. Some participants with strong advocacy positions resisted their assignments, expressing frustration at being separated from the topic areas they came to champion. This paper examines the design implications and observed friction of this randomization strategy as a case of systemic design (Jones, 2014) operating at the intersection of two legitimate but competing democratic logics: deliberation, which asks participants to reason impartially towards collective benefit, and advocacy, which channels lived experience and organised energy towards specific outcomes. We argue that this tension is not a failure of the design but a productive paradox inherent to participatory governance systems. Using Max-Neef’s framework of fundamental human needs—particularly the needs for participation, identity, and freedom—we analyse how random assignment simultaneously fulfilled and frustrated different dimensions of democratic engagement. The paper reflects on how designed artefacts and protocols (posters, cards, flowcharts, table assignments) function as system-level interventions that shape participant behaviour, redistribute agency, and make visible the competing values embedded in civic processes. We conclude with implications for designers working in deliberative civic contexts, proposing that systemic design for participation must account for—rather than eliminate—the friction between impartiality and advocacy, and that this friction itself is a resource for democratic learning.
Keywords: participatory budgeting, deliberative democracy, veil of ignorance, civic advocacy, friction