Christina Margaret Kinnear Lindeberg, Nicola Morelli, and Luca Simeone
To remain within the planetary boundaries, change is required at both the individual and systemic levels, demanding collaboration between citizens and government. Design is increasingly being used to support democratic innovations (e.g. citizens’ assemblies) that enable new opportunities for public participation in political processes. However, these democratic innovations often remain as project-based experiments, isolated from their contextual infrastructure, thus limiting their potential. Democratic innovations need to explore scaling strategies beyond the common replication of methods (scaling out), to focus on impacting organisational and societal infrastructure (scaling up) through understanding and affecting organisational and societal culture (scaling deep). There is consensus that empirical evidence on scaling deep and its relationality to the other scaling strategies, and an emerging discussion suggests that participatory systemic design can help address this. Therefore, this research aims to address the empirical gap around the relationality of scaling deep whilst exploring the potential role of participatory systemic design for supporting democratic innovations to scale deep. This paper presents preliminary findings from empirical research conducted in 2024 and 2025 with participants of a local citizens’ assembly addressing the climate crisis in a Swedish city. Exploring scaling strategies requires situated knowledges, and whilst design research often facilitates this, its underlying logic can be extractive. To foreground situated knowledges, a feminist design experiment was conducted with participants from the local citizens’ assembly, utilising journey mapping. A collaborative workshop in which a journey map visualising the collective experiences of participants and emerging tensions related to scaling citizens’ assemblies was presented and collectively explored. Ten barriers to and opportunities for scaling citizens’ assemblies in the Swedish city were identified and mapped against the prevailing scaling out, scaling up and scaling deep strategies, with six relating to scaling deep. Barriers to scaling deep include communication between citizens and local government, the conflicting temporalities involved in a citizens’ assembly and enabling representation. Opportunities for scaling deep include the collaborative spaces that citizens’ assemblies enable, the education they provide and the energy they create. Furthermore, the majority of the opportunities and barriers identified contributed to more than one scaling strategy, highlighting relationality among scaling strategies. In conclusion, these findings can support those engaged in researching and practising public participation by providing further empirical evidence on scaling deep, suggesting how participatory systemic design can support this and further highlighting the relationality of scaling strategies.
Keywords: democratic innovations, citizens’ assembly, scaling deep, feminist design, sustainable transitions