A village Innovation Centre that refreshes itself with locally co-created knowledge

Xinlong Village Innovation Centre, 1st installment, Jun. 2022

Xinlong Village Innovation Centre, 3rd installment, Feb. 2023

Xinlong Village Innovation Centre, 4th and current installment, Apr. 2023 (Photo by Tianyi Tong)

Xinlong Village is located in the northern-Canton province of China, under the foot of the scenic Mount. Danxia Geopark.

Since spring of 2022, my team has been invited by a prominent local charity to lead regular co-creation camps within the village. These camps are meant to bring together young designers, researchers and other professionals AND local residences, to explore many themes that potentially benefit the future of the village, themes such as aging-friendly housing and micro-business development.

When I was first approached with the project, I was immediately concerned with how effective occasionnel design workshops could be in bring actual long lasting benefits to the local community.

From my experiences, these types of workshops can often be intellectually stimulating social learning processes, but the learning seems to dissipate when the participants leave the camp and go home.

I’ve been pondering about this for years, and I believe one of the problems is that you need at least 3 ingredients for social innovation to really take off: an idea, resources (money) and an innovator. And these 3 things usually don’t come together at the same time. As designers, we can only supply the first ingredient after a design workshop/camp, potentially exciting but not viable on its own.

In my team, we call these design outcomes “concept fetuses”. We need to make them visible for adoption by the other two ingredients.

And this is how the idea of the Village Innovation Centre came to me.

What if we build an accessible physical space in the village to hold the co-creation outputs for adoption, for all to see and through time? After all, these are research insights, innovation concepts and futures generated right here in the village, shouldn’t these be public property that belong to the local community?

So, last year on the last day of our first design camp, we took an empty farm house and experimented with showcasing all the processual outputs from the camp somewhat like an art exhibit. These artifacts included, for example, 12 concepts of future changes written/drawn on cardboards that villagers have voted on with stickers on a previous evening gathering.

Local residents visiting the space when it first opened.

Its been almost an year (though disrupted by Covid) since the Village Innovation Centre first opened (see panorama photos in the beginning of this blog for its progression).

From my perspective, this modest yet lively Innovation Centre now serves at these 3 purposes: archive, context and idea market:

1_Archive

the design camps happen in many temporary sites within the village. When the camps end, all the artifacts are organized into the Innovation Centre for future references.

Design camp usually happen on more expansive locations and can generate “a mess” of outputs

2_Context

pushing social agenda forward is a long and continuous process, but design camps have many one-time/occasional participants. We now have the tradition of beginning and ending every single design camp in the Innovation Centre, and this lets the participants understand informationally and emotionally how they act as momentous “piece” in a continuos flow of efforts.

The last part of every design camp is to refresh the Innovation Centre, participants leave with the notion that they have passed on their knowledge and vision to future participants.

3_Idea market

back to my original concern, how can we effectively match resources and innovators with co-generated concepts for the future? The idea market function of the Innovation Centre is still under experimentation and (my) scrutiny. What is clearly now is that the charity that funded this project has made this space a must see feature for visitors. More time is needed for us to understand if this role can be fulfilled.

The man on the left is a county level government official.

In designing for complex systems, I’ve become increasingly interested in the “continuation of things”, including concepts such as open-ended innovation and going beyond the project.

However, in a consulting team that is most likely to be invited to participate on temporary or occasional bases, also for other complicated and unforeseeable reasons, many design outputs are wishful souls stuck in a Powerpoint limbo without the chance of worldly embodiment, before lost forever.

With this ongoing experiment with the Xinlong Village Innovation Centre, I view co-design as a way of local knowledge generation, and the Innovation Centre is a shared brain that holds shared futures.

Rice patties are filled with water in the spring before sowing.

Personally, the periodic refreshment of contents within the confine space of the Village Innovation Centre makes it a stimulating and curious place for me to start conversations in.

Last month, before leaving the village, I gazed at the farmers do their thing, and thought, wait, these rice patties have long been confined spaces where new possibilities and energy emerge, for as long as people tended to them.

A village Innovation Centre that refreshes itself with locally co-created knowledge

linda@makeapoint.cn