/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// DESIGN HARVESTS: A NETWORK OF SOCIAL COLLABORATIVE INNOVATION HUBS Lou Yongqi/Francesca Valsecchi/ Serena Pollastri Tongji University College of Design and Innovation / Politecnico of Milano, EU Science and Technology Fellowship Programme/TEKTAO Urban Design Consulting Co. Ltd Lou.yongqi@gmail.com / f.valsecchi@gmail.com / serena.pollastri@tektao.com.cn ABSTRACT 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. Keywords: rural development, social innovation, local heritages INTRODUCTION: A BALANCED PERSPECTIVE FOR URBAN/RURAL DEVELOPMENT Developing countries are challenging laboratories for innovative communities that have to deal with existing evolving scenarios that consist of many interconnected parts, often structured in an incoherent and disharmonic way. The Chinese context, in particular, is one of the most critical, because of the rapidity of the growth and the massive changes in the socio-economic system that consists in a mainly massive migration from the rural countryside to urban areas. One of the main impacts of the high speed economic growth in China is the structure of urbanization and the resettlement of the balance between metropolis and rural areas; the countryside is not considered attractive any more, and moving to big cities seems to be the only way to reach progress and development, as a mix of better education, better health care services, higher income and modern lifestyle. In previous publications we discussed a very typical Chinese metaphor to compare the rural-urban system with the Yin and Yang, where two interdependent elements, each with specific characteristics, can strengthen one another to create a harmonious system (Lou, Diaz, 2009;Jegou, 2010). This image clearly entwines that sustainable development of China cannot leave aside the pursuit of a rural-urban balance, and this is obviously a complex relationship because the new urbanism affects the rural areas deeply and involves transformation of the communities. Moreover, the design can approach this balance reconstruction process aiming to keep the value of both the system and enhance the !"#$%&"'( *+, -+"'(. !"#$%%&'()* #, -./0123445 67% 867 9#":& ;#(,%"%($% #( 0%*')( 1%*%<"$75 =4 >$6#?%" @ 8 A#B%C?%"5 0%:,65 67% A%67%":<(&*D E&'6%& ?F ADGDHD 1##I%(?J")5 KDKD ;7%( L !DMD /6<NN%"*D