In this article, the authors confront challenges faced in public planning projects when the desire to implement participatory design is complicated by the need for mass quantities of data. Using one case of participatory design in urban planning, they suggest that planners struggled to effectively employ participatory design methodology because they neglected to collect the tacit knowledge generated through their participatory processes. Coupling participatory design with a listening rhetoric, they suggest that participatory processes that include tacit knowledge and representative citizen participation might augment public planning projects that hope for both big data collection and democratic approaches to urban planning.