The idea of “designing for life” sounds meaningful – but what do those words mean in practice? And especially important for young people: what jobs are available in that space?
To explore those questions, the 44 people shown above met last week in Chedun Town, a rural area near Shanghai, for Design Harvests – a walking, mapping and bioregioning workshop
First launched on Chongming Island near Shanghai in 2008, by Professor Lou Yongqi, Design Harvests is an in-situ exploration of how rural innovation and development can be revitalised by design using an ‘acupuncture approach’.
In last week’s workshop – as part of the launch of Design Harvests III – a quarter of the group were urban-rural professionals with some kind of design background. Their number included a “Rural CEO’’, a “Rural Learning Centre Principal”, a “Rural Project Coordinator” and so on.
My contribution was to talk about unusual but real-world but jobs that are now emerging in rural contexts: jobs in food and water systems, building re-use, agritourism, next-generation hospitality, and the use of AI in social infrastructures. You can see the (one hour) talk here.
Our next step in Design Harvests will furnish our physical hub in Chedun Town with equipment, information, and people. As the interface to a physical-virtual knowledge ecosystem about all things urban-rural, the will help diverse actors in the territory learn from each other.
Then, later in the year, we hope to organise a three-day ‘semi-nomadic festival’. This will feature pop-up events distributed around the territory – for example in a farm, at the market, in a factory, by a river.
Each evening, we will all meet together in a central location; eat together in an informal food festival; and discuss, with each other, what we had seen and experienced that day. On the last day, everyone will share what relationships they planned to establish, or strengthen.
