Miaoxia community kitchen : a socio-material approach towards rural sustainability

Abstract

The collaborative research in rural Sichuan involved two disciplines: the applied social sciences and spatial design and their research methodologies and action research provided the “software” as community engagement and social organization and the development design “hardware” outcomes through participatory design processes. This resulted in a community kitchen that enabled villagers to develop social enterprises and collective organizations. The outcomes produced greater cohesiveness and self-organization, helping to rejuvenate a stagnant village. The repositioning of design within dynamic social processes as a socio-material assembly or as design together with its social attributes, expands the idea that the participatory design can be a complex adaptive system of knowledge generation. This has broader implications in outlining how collaborative social design approaches positively impact sustainable rural development, generating an understanding of resources, capacities, and capabilities as local knowledge ecologies, and tools of social innovation and change.