When addressing societal change and civic engagement, the idea of participatory culture as a cultivator of issue formation and collaborative engagement has, for a long time, been a foundational aspect of participatory design (henceforth co-design). It has also been a vivid and dynamic topic of discussion in this Interactions forum. We have observed the ways in which the problems and issues that design aims to address are becoming increasingly challenging to formulate in projects. This is because the participating sets of stakeholders most often are quite diverse and have conflicting agendas and interests. To address this complexity, participation is becoming a widespread approach in traditional innovation processes and in processes aiming for societal change. The era of participation carries both promises of empowerment as well as risks of exploitation. We argue that co-designers engaging with participatory processes need to pay particular attention to ethical concerns regarding representation, accountability, tradition and transcendence, and mutual learning.