This paper uses three cases of the authors’ research working with rural communities in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland to reflect on the methods used to mediate between various groups and community members in citizen-engaged projects. We highlight the effects of making visible, with communities, the assets and relationships that exist in each context. Taking a combined ethnographic and participatory approach, we explain how in each of the cases we worked to contextualise a situation and collaboratively form a detailed picture of these community ecologies. In this we consider the question: by uncovering the context of communities with communities themselves, are designers more able to position themselves in the particular situation and account for their own agency? Through our reflections we discuss how our approach contributed to a deeper understanding of contextual issues including individuals, groups, roles, skills, and relationships. This allows us to propose a speculative frame to support designers to reflexively work with communities to collectively build representations of existing social networks, position themselves as active participants within these community ecologies and provide the foundations for together planning future interventions – approaches and activities that aim to enable positive change.