Design-driven strategies for the sustainable textile heritage community in China

The people who involved in the heritage community can represent the local identity and traditional knowhow is the key element for sustainable development in using the local resources and heritage knowledge (Faro convention, 2005). In this context, the design intervention is considered a strategy to empower the local people innovation processes connecting skills and knowledge and creative resource in order to build a sustainable social innovation and create new values for heritage communities. However, a research opportunity has emerged during the Ph.D. research in the field of Chinses textile heritage: even if people believe innovation is the way to revive traditional textile craftsmanship, there is no systematic activation model that can not only recognize the values of the textile crafts, but also sustain the craft community’s capabilities and behaviors. In this scenario, based on design activation methods and a strategy with hypotheses of solutions, this paper describes a new approach applied to the sustainable textile heritage communities.