Envisioning Collective Wishes with Local Community for Social Innovation towards Village Regeneration in Inner Mongolia

This paper reports co-design interventions with local community of practice at Inner Mongolia, who are keepers of a vernacular architectural practice dated back to 2000 bc. The research aims to explore a social innovation method towards sustainable village regeneration in China. We report four days community engagements with tools and activities designed and implemented as a result of collaboration between three design researchers, local NGOs and the local community. We describe co-design interventions based on a framework of co-design which works through envisioning and enacting community’s imagination for social innovation. We conclude by addressing the embodied co-design tools developed with the locals as an unobtrusive form of activities to engage community to work towards consensus. We addressed the importance of design activism, which take into the considerations local values, and to achieve social innovation through collaborative imagination of the community’s collective wishes.