AP6 |
convening the ecosystem. paolo CASATI
Some of the most successful engagement systems worldwide are layered to enable various participants to connect, engage through common understanding, and participate repeatedly. Ecosystem engagement happens when an operator focuses on developing infrastructure rather than just executing programmes.
A well-known example of this broad structure is the Chinese Super app Meituan. Originally a food delivery platform, it has expanded to over 200 categories, serving 770 million users annually and supporting more than thirteen million active merchants. Launched in March 2025, its membership program—described as membership-as-infrastructure—uses traditional loyalty techniques like tiers, points, and periodic recalculations, but applies them in new ways. The tier system mainly benefits individual customers and is intentionally designed to connect merchants with clients across various categories. This strategy emphasizes the advantage of cross-category engagement, where relationships built in one category can be utilized across all others.
The contributors in this cluster work within very different ecosystems, but each performs a similar role in their own brand.
Paolo Casati co-founded Fuorisalone, a platform dedicated to design year-round. It is widely recognized as the ecosystem that transforms Milan by hosting a network of events – 1,200 in 2026 – during the annual Design Week, linking over 230 showrooms across the Brera, Tortona, and other design districts.
Nancy Lee chairs the Friends of the Hong Kong Museum of Art, a patron community whose volunteer governance, fundraising, and programming have supported the museum for over thirty years.
Armando Porcari and Fabrizio del Signore managed The Gallery Apart in Rome for twenty-two years, from 2003 to 2025. They served as a key intermediary within the contemporary art scene, facilitating connections among artists, curators, museum directors, foundations, fair organizers, critics, and collectors—who might not have otherwise encountered one another.
Each contributor draws on the cumulative advantages of the ecosystems they operate inside.
During Fuorisalone in Milan, a designer’s involvement increases their visibility across multiple audiences. At the Hong Kong Museum of Art, being part of the Friends program grants access to international exhibitions, curatorial travel, and civic connections. At The Gallery Apart, an artist featured in the gallery’s program gains recognition within a network of institutions and critical circles that a single exhibition alone could not have achieved.
What sets ecosystem engagement models like these apart is a specific structural approach: independent operators maintain their own agency and identity, while the connecting operator offers infrastructure and clarity without micromanaging participant activities; gatekeeping responsibilities are spread across local nodes rather than centralised; the connecting operator does not control participants’ businesses or dictate their strategies; and participants can join or leave freely, with the system’s coherence based on shared identity and mutual benefits rather than hierarchy.
These features allow members to join a network that preserves their identity and cultural values while gaining access to the platform’s tools and visibility. The benefits go beyond agility and organization: the system is designed to evolve and refresh itself as its components and user needs change, eliminating the need for operators to redesign it every time circumstances shift. Instead, it is built to adapt smoothly.
The ecosystem also creates its own culture. For a long time, engagement was controlled by gatekeepers who maintained quality, coherence, and trust within cultural and commercial ecosystems and acted as judges at the entry point. Over time, they came to function as curators of projects and relationships.
As shared platforms serving as infrastructure that many actors can access on their own terms, they also become a cultural agent, in part replacing earlier gatekeepers and ‘maîtres du goût’, with their own curatorial formulas and operational cultures — intercepting changes in the public faster and responding to interests and needs that were previously considered secondary.
This can attract criticism. The 2026 edition of Fuorisalone — the most successful so far — has drawn complaints about the inclusion of established brands, allegedly resulting in a loss of curatorial coherence after years of serving a constituency of smaller companies and other business entities. And yet the same model is what gives Fuorisalone, and ecosystems like it, the capacity for impact and the longevity that less adaptive formats rarely sustain.
Of course, not every ecosystem needs to change over time. At the Friends of the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the volunteer patrons and their programming have held their founding culture across more than thirty years, precisely because the constituency they serve has changed slowly and by careful cultivation, despite changes in the city that might have reshaped the constituency itself. This second path provides substantial value in maintaining culture and allowing the development and carry-forward of a unified ‘brand’ language over time — a defining choice that a brand like the Museum of Art, historically solid and profoundly rooted in its heritage, is able to make.
What The Gallery Apart’s closure adds to the observation, however, is that ecosystems which hold a founding culture endure across change but can falter when the shared field they inhabit is itself contested — when the audience for careful work, the institutional space for it, and the collectors who once sustained it become harder to find, or when the founding culture, however well cultivated, is not sufficient by itself to guarantee longevity.
Longevity, in ecosystems as in other engagement models, depends on the interaction of brand, constituency, and size. What matters most is not the choice between them but whether the cultural offer remains relevant to the constituency the ecosystem is trying to hold. A coherent constituency and a relevant cultural offer allow the ecosystem to sustain itself. When either weakens — when the offer loses relevance or when competition intensifies — the ecosystem must weigh a broader membership against the risk of estranging those it already holds. In both directions, the substantive question is the same: is the culture the ecosystem carries still meaningful to those inside it?