With increasing environmental issues, social polarisation, and democratic disconnection, design practice must move from its customary consultation to approaches that constructively develop resilience, inclusion, and ecological stewardship. This article outlines the Ecological Citizen(s) Preferable Futures Deck ( PF Deck ), a speculative, scenarios-based set of tools co-designed with a UKRI-funded collaboration. Located at the intersection of participatory design, futures thinking, and ecological citizenship, the PF Deck is a well-being intervention that operates through physical, mental, social, and environmental space. In this article, we understand ecological well-being as the capacity of human and more-than-human systems to flourish together within planetary limits, and social well-being as the quality of relationships, inclusion, and justice that enable people and communities to live thriving, dignified, connected lives. It aims to cultivate reflection, conversation, and imagination and to evoke place-based action for individual and collective well-being for an ecologically ethical transition. The PF Deck recognises that human well-being and planetary health are connected. Evidence is repeatedly showing that access to nature, whether in green space, ecological stewardship, or innovations such as green prescribing, enhances physical and mental well-being. Yet, human activity substantially impacts ecological systems with responsibilities extending beyond individuals. The PF Deck responds by offering structured yet open-ended questions that challenge people to think about other possible futures, redefine civic agency, and think about their or their organisations ecological role. Tested through contexts like the London Design Festival, the Royal College of Art, and Falmouth University, the PF Deck has enabled values-based dialogue, systems literacy, and co-design of civic futures that are attuned to social and ecological flourishing. Rather than imposing solutions, it is a relational scaffold that enables pluralism, care, and distributed authorship. We term this a post-participatory intervention: designers do not simply facilitate ‘good’ participation in predefined projects, but act as catalysts and conveners of ongoing, community-led practices that may continue and transform beyond the original design frame. By remapping designers as facilitators of participation rather than makers of results, the PF Deck encourages a post-participatory paradigm grounded in inclusivity, autonomy, and resilience. Theoretically, the paper demonstrates how design interventions can function as an ecology and social well-being mediator. Methodologically, it contributes a post-participatory design process that combines feminist situated knowledges, ethical language audits, and iterative live testing as an approach to designing for ecological and social well-being. Practically, it offers a piloted toolkit translatable between health, education, community, and policy settings, with particular relevance for; community organisers, educators, civil society organisations, local authorities, and policy-adjacent actors seeking to cultivate ecological citizenship in place-based ways, facilitating community-led ecological and democratic transformation in the midst of climate, health, and social crises. This paper documents the generation of the Ecological Citizen(s) Preferable Futures Deck (PF Deck), tracing its conceptual grounding, design process, and iterative refinement. Rather than presenting the toolkit as a finished product, the article positions the PF Deck as the outcome of a research-through-design journey that responds to ecological, social, and democratic crises. The work sits within post-participatory design, where designers are framed not as solution providers but as conveners who create the conditions for collective authorship. The PF Deck was developed through a meta-design approach, assembling modular card types, Mindsets, Big Picture, Approaches, Considerations, and open “What if?” prompts, that could be flexibly adapted to different contexts. Visual aesthetics, tone, and structure were deliberately crafted to feel invitational, with soft palettes, hand-drawn symbols, and plain, conversational language replacing abstract or academic phrasing. The toolkit's development was iterative: ideas were prototyped, play-tested in-house, and then piloted at the London Design Festival, the Royal College of Art, and Falmouth University. These sessions provided insight into how participants navigated values alignment, systems literacy, and open dialogue. Feedback highlighted the importance of psychological safety, pacing, and accessible language, leading to the addition of micro-glossaries, facilitation notes, and modular run-of-show options. Crucially, the paper shows that the real power of the PF Deck lies not in its content but in the relationships it enables. It is a relational scaffold that supports values-based dialogue, pluralism, and distributed agency, fostering civic imagination without prescribing solutions. The process also revealed the significance of designing for ambiguity and plurality, emphasising that transformation occurs through scaling deep, cultural and relational change, rather than scaling up predefined models. By reflecting on its own assumptions, positionalities, and revisions, the paper contributes to debates on ecological citizenship, design justice, and participatory methods. It offers both a practical resource and a methodological account of how to generate toolkits that are adaptable, inclusive, and capable of nurturing ecological and social well-being across diverse settings.
Gooding et al. (Fri,) studied this question.