From Input to Interbeing
- APF Community
- 1 day ago
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Part 1: Reframing Public Participation as a Living System
By amalia deloney
Designing Regenerative Participation for Public Futures
We often invite the public into the future through surveys, charrettes, and facilitated sessions. But what if the future needs deeper invitations—ones that nourish interbeing rather than extract opinions?
Despite good intentions, many public engagement processes remain transactional, time-bound, and symbolic. They ask people to show up, speak up, and then move on. These forms of participation tend to reinforce the illusion that listening has occurred, while leaving little space for transformation or relationship.
In my work, I’ve observed that traditional engagement practices often rely on extractive logics, treating people as mere data points and communities as inputs. However, participation should not be just a step in the process—it is the process. It must evolve to become regenerative, fostering genuine collaboration and growth.
We must shift from participation as input to participation as a relational, life-affirming practice.
That shift has been clarified and deepened for me through The Dragonfly Journey, an immersive community of practice grounded in Holoptic Foresight Dynamics® (HFD) offered by TFSX. HFD frames futures practice not as something observed from above, but something co-sensed from within—a relational, many-membered view of the whole that generates a co-creative perception of what wants to emerge. It has helped me articulate what I believe many of us in the field are feeling: that the futures we seek require not just imagination or design, but deep attunement to complexity, context, and connection.
I believe it’s time for futurists to enter a new kind of conversation—one that regenerates how we invite people into public futures work, grounded in transformative practices, our deepest questions, and the thinkers who have inspired and challenged us along the way.
The Trouble with Engagement-as-Usual
Much of what we call civic participation is built on governance models that were never designed to hold complexity. These systems tend to prioritize expertise over experience, consensus over contradiction, and linear progress over nonlinear growth. Even as we layer in new language—co-creation, design thinking, community-based planning—the infrastructure often remains unchanged.
In writing about ‘complex facilitation,’ Chris Corrigan —a seasoned facilitator and leader in the Art of Hosting and complexity-informed practice—suggests that in complex environments, the facilitator’s role is less about controlling people or outcomes and more about creating the conditions where self-organization can naturally emerge.
This insight resonates deeply. Many communities experience engagement fatigue not because they lack interest, but because they know the game. They’ve been asked to show up and give input without any shift in structure, power, or pace.
Urban planner, community activist, and artist James Rojas, founder of Place It!, brings a similarly transformational lens. Through model-making, storytelling, and play, Place It! engages communities in reimagining their environments. Rojas argues that traditional urban planning often neglects the emotional and cultural experiences of residents, resulting in spaces that fail to resonate. By blending interior design principles with city planning, his work invites participants to explore the interplay of thought, emotion, and form—fostering environments that reflect identity and deepen belonging.
If we are serious about bringing the public into foresight work, we must reimagine not only what participation looks like, but why we invite it in the first place—and how we design for its unfolding.
Participation as a Living System
In my work with cities, community organizations, and cultural institutions, I’ve been experimenting with an approach I call regenerative participation. This isn’t a new methodology. Instead, it’s a shift in how we relate to systems, time, and to one another.
Regenerative participation is:
Rooted in place and seasonal rhythms
Grounded in relationship and reciprocity
Inspired by living systems (feedback, diversity, interdependence)
Rather than treating participation as a step in a process, it asks us to treat it as an ecosystem—something to be nourished, composted, and cultivated over time.
This approach draws from multiple disciplines: biomimicry, Warm Data, Theory U, and systems sensing. But it also draws from movement work, cultural strategy, and my own lived experience navigating social change initiatives of multiple sizes.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist and author, offers a framing that resonates deeply with this practice. She emphasizes the importance of reciprocity in our relationship with the natural world—recognizing the gifts nature provides and responding in kind. Gratitude, she suggests, is a doorway to reciprocal care, a way of honoring our interdependence and co-creating with the Earth. Her work invites us to see ourselves not as separate from nature, but as participants in a continuous cycle of exchange—where regeneration is relational.
And it is this orientation that changes everything.
Because when we stop designing like engineers and start designing like ecosystems, we begin to create spaces that can hold emergence, contradiction, and aliveness.
Design for Compost, Not Just Harvest
One of the guiding provocations in my work is this:
What if we designed for compost, not just harvest?
Compost is a slow, messy, alchemical process. It turns what no longer serves into soil. It invites decay, transformation, and time.
In public participation, we often skip this step. We go straight to visioning, ideating, or planning—without letting go of what came before. But without compost, we risk building futures on unprocessed grief, broken trust, and unacknowledged harm.
In one recent project, we began with a ritual of disorientation. No introductions, no sticky notes. Just deep listening and shared storywork. One participant said:
“I’ve never experienced a workshop that felt like a rehearsal for the future I actually want.”
That wasn’t engagement. It was emergence.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of “From Input to Interbeing”, where I share practices and provocations—both real and imagined—that bring regenerative participation to life in public futures work. We’ll explore design compost, speculative labs, community rituals, and the principles that guide this evolving field.
© amalia deloney, 2025
amalia deloney was bitten by the futures bug in fourth grade through Future Problem Solving, sparking a lifelong passion for foresight and systems change. As a strategic foresight practitioner, design strategist, and founder of point A studio, she helps organizations and communities navigate complexity and build regenerative futures. With a background in law, philanthropy, and human rights, amalia has spent decades working at the intersection of power, policy, and systemic transformation. She is particularly committed to participatory methods that empower neighborhood and community leaders, ensuring those closest to the challenges shape the futures they envision.
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