Maryam Mohiuddin Ahmed, Dilek Sayedahmed, and Sean Geobey
Systemic design increasingly convenes participants to help shape complex interventions, yet the participation invited by design is not one thing. Between the thinnest advisory input and the fullest sharing of design authority lie shades of participation, and behind them shades of shared futures: structurally distinct arrangements of information, agency, and relational infrastructure that determine what participants can actually change and what remains fixed for them. Drawing on a multi-year participatory systems mapping process conducted as part of Canada’s Investment Readiness Programme 2.0, and revisiting that experience through three community-rooted cases spanning goal-level information-architecture redesign (vTaiwan), architecture-level institutionalisation (Porto Alegre), and mindset-level reconstitution (Rojava), this paper develops a four-level framework through which the shades of shared design authority become analytically visible as distinct configurations, not points on a single scale. Meadows (1999) locates where design intervention is most transformative in complex systems. Ostrom (1990) specifies the institutional architecture through which layered decision agency is sustained across scales. Care ethics scholarship (Fisher and Tronto, 1990; Tronto, 2019; Greenwood, 2007; Raghuram, 2016) names the relational substrate through which architectural conditions become operational in practice. Sottini, Giudici, and Cannatelli (2026), extending a decade of social intermediation scholarship, name the sequenced regenerative work through which reflexive capacity is restored when marginalisation has fractured it. The Investment Readiness Programme mapping process produced shared interpretation without redistributing design authority; participation shaped what the ecosystem saw about itself but did not reshape what the ecosystem was optimising for. The three community-rooted cases demonstrate what becomes structurally possible when preconditions are met and all four levels align. The paper contributes to systemic design scholarship on three fronts. It proposes that the design of the design process is itself a first-order systemic-design decision. It exposes the persistent tendency in practice to treat participatory activity as if it were shared design authority. And it shows that the structural conditions for constitutive systemic design can be identified from within a design arrangement by those working inside it.
Keywords: systemic design, constitutive participation, shared design authority, relational care, commons scholarship, social innovation