Co-Designing AI-Enhanced E-Participation. Insights from ORBIS Participatory Approaches to Democratic Deliberation

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly embedded in civic technologies, including e-participation tools and platforms designed to support democratic deliberation. Yet, while a growing “participatory turn” in AI design (Delgado et al., 2023) promotes stakeholder engagement, participation is often enacted as a discrete format or early-stage aspiration rather than as a sustained process embedded across the lifecycle of AI systems. This paper examines how Participatory Design (PD) operates as a socio-technical mediation mechanism in the development of AI-enhanced e-participation tools and platforms. Drawing on the Horizon Europe project ORBIS and its six deliberative pilots, the study builds on Delgado et al.’s (2023) four analytical dimensions—goals, scope, participants, and methods—to elaborate an intermediate theoretical account of how PD structures negotiation between differentiated deliberative practices and AI configurations over time. The findings show that AI-enhanced deliberation becomes democratically meaningful not through technological optimisation alone, but through sustained mediation that aligns civic practices with evolving technological affordances under institutional constraints and deliberative needs. The paper contributes a structured account of PD as a longitudinal socio-technical mediation process for developing AI-enhanced civic technologies beyond isolated engagement interventions.