Design Harvests: A Network of Social Collaborative Innovation Hubs

The paper introduces an innovative social collaborative design project: “Design Harvests”— Design for Xian Qiao sustainable rural community in Chongming. The goal of this project is to create prototypes of sustainable rural-urban interaction and development based on the usage of local resources and strengths. One of the most important proposals is to establish a network of innovation hubs together with the local community. Each innovation hub will be a platform of promoting a series of sustainable design solutions for local development. More over, it will incubate and demonstrate new business models based on the resources of the rural communities and interaction between urban and rural. Meanwhile, a systematic network is designed and formed among the hubs to have holistic and systemic impacts throughout the whole territory. The key principle of this project is co-creation and interdiscipline. Enabling the local community through social collaboration is one of the main tasks of this project. Social collaboration in this project is not only the cooperation among different stakeholders such as government, enterprises,designers and communities but also among different disciplines such as economics,sociology,engineering and design. To conclude, the paper summarizes the methodology used in this project and explores more possibilities of how design can contribute to such a kind of social collaborative process.