As designers entering the community, how can we position ourselves as boundary objects, becoming porous and permeable?
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Rapid urbanization in China has intensified the challenges faced by migrant children living in urban villages, where inadequate infrastructure and complex social dynamics hinder their socialization and community integration. This study takes Maquanying Village in Beijing as a case to explore how social design methods can support the socialization of migrant children. Through field investigations, we identified key spaces, scenarios, and actors influencing children’s everyday experiences, and developed a co-creative activity design approach to foster socialization. We then conducted community-based exploratory workshops using a participatory toolkit, involving children, parents, volunteers, and residents to reconfigure social relationships within the village. Finally, we iteratively refined the toolkit through implementation and participant feedback. The resulting exploratory tabletop toolkit offers a systematic, participatory method for designing socialization activities in urban villages, filling a gap in social design research on migrant children and demonstrating how participatory design can intervene in urban village renewal to foster social integration.
General Background
Ethnographic Study
#01 Fieldwork in Yu Xin Zhuang Village
#02 Fieldwork in Xin Zhuang Village
Xinzhuang Village is a community established by young artists in collaboration with the Changping Municipal Government, aiming to create a settlement where art and modern living harmoniously coexist. It regularly hosts events such as art community markets and was originally founded by parents concerned with children's education.
#03 Fieldwork in Maquanying Village
Participatory observation in schools for migrant children
In addition, I joined a mobile library built at a school for migrant workers’ children as a volunteer, where I had the opportunity to interact with the children. In my work, I observed that these children rarely interacted with new volunteers and even displayed some resistance. This made it difficult for me to gather crucial information. To address this, I created a simple card for the children to write down their after-school activities during their lunch break. I then organised the collected information using an affinity diagram, identifying the following points of entry.
Thematic Analysis
Workshop Design
#01 Community Exploratory Workshops
Through exploratory and inspirational design thinking practices, the children of Maquanying Village are empowered to engage with the spatial fabric of their community. A toolkit is provided to assist them in reflecting upon their surroundings, daily lives, and the sensations experienced within these fluid contexts.
The objects provided to facilitate exploration and reflection are based on ethnographic observations of the urban village’s environment and infrastructure, with particular attention to how children explore the non-human elements of the village to cultivate pro-environmental socialization skills.
#02 Community Cleaning Plan
Spontaneous cleaning of community spaces is one of the most effective forms of intervention. Especially in urban villages, where public and private boundaries are often blurred, cleaning activities can impact the living environment of multiple stakeholders. We observe how other residents perceive children’s cleaning behaviors and explore whether such activities can help build deeper community connections. Trash naturally becomes a boundary object that facilitates conversations between children and the residents near the spots where they collect it.
#03 Suggestion Box
Encourage children to construct a suggestion box enabling local residents to provide feedback, offering them diverse materials for exploratory crafting as part of their social-emotional learning and responsibility education.
#Video
Research Probe Kits