Between wrapping and unwrapping yarn
Invited by the local branch of an international NGO focused on child development, my team has been tasked with designing and facilitating a series of child-centered co-design workshops in a rural community in Yunnan Province. These workshops, scheduled across several weekends, aim to support local children—especially girls aged 8 to 12—in experimenting with ways to make changes in their community’s public spaces.
Yunnan, located in southwestern China, is a vast, mountainous region known for its ethnically diverse populations. Historically, it has been a focal point for international NGOs, drawn by its economic underdevelopment and the complex dynamics among its many local cultures. The sponsor of this program has already established several community-based children's activity spaces, known as "Children's Homes," each staffed with onsite social workers. Using one of these "Children's Homes" as a basecamp, the program aims to introduce community-based co-design methodologies in a child-friendly way, extending both the physical activity spaces and the children's influence into the broader community. As a pilot program, the sponsors hope to see two main outcomes: the empowerment of the participating girls and visible changes in community spaces.
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Unlike the community-based co-design projects I usually facilitate in villages—where we make multiple rounds of communication with local authorities to define a clear goal (for example, building a new park), and where both adults and children participate—this pilot program began without directives from local authorities and placed an emphasis on being children-led. This means there is more open-endedness and uncertainty in the changes the program might bring about.
I defined the workshops as a kind of "proposal through prototyping": supporting children to create prototypes of the changes they wish to see, using these prototypes as a way to voice their ideas and gain support within the community. The workshop is structured into three phases, each taking place over a weekend:
1. Futuring: Children engage in an activity I call **Two Eyes**. One is the "current eye," which sees local realities, and the other is the "future eye," which envisions a future based on those realities. They are encouraged to draw what the two eyes see side-by-side and think about what actions are needed to bridge the gap.
2. Quick Prototyping: Based on the outcomes of the first weekend, children group themselves according to shared interests and use simple, generic materials—cardboard, colored masking tape, and chunky hand-knitting yarn—to create **dirty prototypes** (which I explain as building life-size models).
3. Functional Prototyping and Documentation: Based on the prototypes from the second weekend, the groups replace selected parts with more functional materials and orchestrate a photo or video shoot in situ to present and explain their ideas to the wider community.
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By the time the second workshop weekend in J Village came around, I had already become familiar with both the site and its children. The Children's Home there is a warm, two-story building, filled inside with children's artwork and donated toys. It shares a basketball court, a small wooded area, and some parking spaces with a government office that closes on weekends.
Because our workshop was scheduled for early in the morning, my colleague and I arrived late the night before, hauling large bags of prototyping materials. It was only then that the local social worker informed us they had been called into a mandatory meeting at the last minute and would not be on-site to support us the next morning. Having already built some trust with the children and familiarity with the site, we decided it would not be a problem.
The next morning, I followed a group of four children we named the Forest Team, whose wish was to make the small wooded area near the Children's Home more fun and interesting. They carried cardboard and colorful chunky yarn into the square-shaped space, which had about a dozen evenly spaced trees growing over patchy grass.
After building simple "swings" by hanging cardboard from the trees with yarn, the team grew excited about decorating the trees themselves. Making the woods more colorful was important! They experimented with different ways of wrapping and streaming the yarn around the trunks and branches.
I was especially moved by the active participation of Kai*, a 15-year-old boy who, although technically past the program’s age range, had been included because he has an intellectual disability. The previous week, when activities were mostly drawing- and discussion-based, Kai had struggled to participate. But now, working with yarn, he was helping in many ways—moving, tying, wrapping alongside his teammates.
The children were as wrapped up in yarn as the trees when a slightly stocky middle-aged man, who had been lurking in the background, suddenly approached us briskly. Once he was sure he had our attention, he asked, forcefully, whether we planned to take everything down soon—because, he announced, an inspection from higher-level government officials was expected.
From my perspective, I did some quick sense-making in my head:
He’s likely part of the local authority responsible for making the community look presentable. We’re in a compound that hosts the Children's Home. The local social workers are not here right now. This is a shared public space. The children are engaged in an organized, well-intentioned activity. This should be low risk. The children huddled around me and asking whether they needed to take everything down. I gestured for them to relax and continue working as they wished.
We were interrupted a second time when the man returned, clearly surprised by our lack of response to his earlier directive. This time, he began to challenge my authority to be there and questioned which institution I represented. After some ineffective exchanges, I assured him that I also had "authorities" to report to, and therefore could not cut the activity short. I added that we would take everything down once our activities were over, and in the meantime, we would be careful not to make a mess—the woods would only look better in the process.
Sticking to our original schedule, the Forest Team headed back to our home-base - the second floor group activity room inside the Children's Home - to wait for the other teams to return and debrief. Our next activity would be to learn to use a digital camera to make photo documentation of the prototypes. We were just about to play a game while waiting when the same man entered the lively, noisy room and ordered us to "tidy up all of our things and leave the compound right away."
The children immediately began to silently arranging the scattered cards and markers. "Wait," I said. I pulled out my cellphone and gathered the children with my eyes. "Let’s run down quickly to take photos of our work, and then undo everything so we can recycle the yarn. How’s that?"
Without looking back, we ran downstairs.
On our way, I quickly briefed them on the next activity: they would take turns being photographers, directors, and actors, making photos to show how people might use the "new wooded area." The children acted with urgency and creativity, finding different angles to showcase their swings and decorated trees. Kai happily posed in the pictures. When there were no more ideas for photos, we began to take everything down.
"Everything?" "Yes, but maybe we can do it again in some other way."
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The other team's site of interest—a bus stop further down the road—had experienced less disruption. However, after hearing about the situation, they also finished their photo documentation quickly and returned, carrying their prototype with them.
The final activity of the day was designed to be a 10-minute reflection I called "the Feeling Tree." Each participant would draw a facial expression on a circle-shaped piece of cardboard to represent their feelings, share their reflections one by one, and then connect their expressions into a small sculpture. My colleagues and I quickly decided to do this activity in a play area on the first floor of the Children's Home, rather than the designated group activity room upstairs. In hindsight, although this area was even more prone to distractions, its openness made me feel less trapped— as if we could quickly disperse in all directions if we needed to.
The first girl to share, a nine-year-old from the Forest Team, said she felt "speechless" and added a blank, inanimate face to the Feeling Tree.
With some gentle encouragement, she spoke again, this time in a low voice, sharing her disappointment at having to dismantle their work so suddenly. The others from the Forest Team agreed that speechlessness was a shared feeling. I asked them what reasons the man might have had for opposing their work. The children suggested he might have worried the prototypes would fall apart and leave yarn and cardboard littering the grass. Some proposed that next time, we could put up signs asking others not to disturb the installation. Others suggested making stronger attachments between the yarn and the trees.
With the man still lingering nearby, clearly waiting for us to leave, I wanted to end on a note of pride. I reminded the children that many cool spaces—like campsites, music festivals, and markets—are designed to be temporary. I also reminded everyone that we discovered many ways to use the chunky yarn, and that we captured photos to showcase our work. I asked everyone, myself included, to think about what we can do with these things.
With that, we apologised to the man, who now we know is the community secretary, hurried to finish cleaning up and sent everyone home.
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The seven-hour highspeed train ride home gave me plenty of time to ruminate on what had taken place in J Village.
The ambiguity of decision rights—who has the authority to alter a public space, and how children's activities are permitted—has always been a recurring theme when working in rural communities. Perhaps things would have gone more smoothly if the local social workers had been on-site. But the moments of solidarity I shared with the children—defying orders and pushing for our goals—left me feeling a quiet excitement, as if we were the Smurfs who had found our own Gargamel. At the same time, I found myself empathizing with the community secretary, who was trapped within the limits of his own governing habits. In some ways, I appreciated the disruption he caused. It provided the children with an unplanned yet deeply authentic experience: an encounter with the power dynamics that inevitably shape public spaces.
All of these are rich experiences for me, but how could I present them as opportunities to the sponsors, who might by now be thinking it's perhaps too risky for children to dabble into community-level affairs? Taking my gaze back from the villages passing by the window beside me, I continued to read _Uncertainty and Possibility_ (Akama et al., 2018) and let my thoughts bounce back and forth between its texts.
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Three days later, I was fully prepared for the scheduled meeting with the charity sponsor — not just on the practical tasks of how we might have clearer communication with the community secretary, but also on how we might think about public space alterations in a way that fits children's roles and local contingencies more broadly. I suggested that supporting children — who, for many reasons, have less power of influence — to engage in public space design may not always result in permanent visible changes in the community. However, we can expand our definition of success in the following ways:
1. Support the children in identifying local spaces where they have strong influence, such as inside the Children's Home;
2. Include meaningful temporary spatial changes, such as designing and setting up spaces for community events;
3. Include the transfer of ideas, skills, and experiences across physical spaces — for example, encouraging children in J Village to find alternative opportunities to decorate with chunky yarn.
While the pilot program is ongoing, I suggested that these ideas could give us a clearer direction for what it truly means to support children’s engagement with public spaces, balancing tangible changes with the cultivation of their agency and sense of empowerment. The sponsor responded positively and expressed confidence in continuing the program.
What I did not share in the meeting was that the seeds of these thoughts had been planted during our rushed reflection session with the children on the first floor of the Children's Home in J Village.
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In the book Uncertainty and Possibility, authors suggest a radical constructive outlook at uncertainty when we consider the process of design. While conventionally, uncertainty is associated with risk and the latter is something meant to be mitigated, authors suggest leveraging the emergent and provisional properties of uncertainty as a technology to navigate complex situations. This generative technology is described to have three core themes:
1. Technology of disruption: by making the familiar strange, deconstruct and speculate for a realignment of intentions, process and outcomes;
2. Technology of surrender: unlearning our prescriptive tendencies and giving up control and boundaries, embrace accidents and failures through the appreciation for the "interdependency of being and non-beings";
3. Technology of moving-beyond: generating tentative and inconclusive understandings what might be next, and making proposals for future actions.
While practicing co-design, I have always _dealt with_ uncertainty, but I had never thought of intentionally engaging with it as a strategy — until now. Reflecting on the events in J Village, I realized that disruption and surrender unfolded in pronounced ways, surfacing experiences leveraging on the generative value of uncertainty in real-world situations.
The visible disruption in our J Village event did not start with the community secretary’s cancellation order. It began when the Forest Team started altering the wooded area, disturbing what some viewed as a boring space by introducing new materials and new uses. Their actions triggered a cascade of mutual disruptions, exposing hidden tensions among different community actors — and even between the project and its behind-the-scenes funders. Through these tensions, new negotiations of boundaries were initiated. The experiences we gained through this process helped refine our understanding of the practical scope of children-led public space co-design, which I believe will continue to be an important theme for this community and for the sponsor’s future program design.
And how did surrender play out? From our side, the Forest Team made some concessions to the community secretary’s demands, while quietly defying others. In turn, the community secretary did the same. In this sense, surrender became a process of mutual inclusion, where competing goals coexist and shape one another, albeit with some discomfort. What felt most valuable to me was that, by treating the community secretary’s objection as a voice from within the community, we — the children and the program designers — had the opportunity to incorporate dissent as part of our engagement process. From a co-design perspective, I do not view the community secretary as a obstacle to the workshop. Instead, from the moment he expressed his opinion, he became an active participant, helping to shape both the process and the outcome. In this light, surrender becomes an active and creative incorporation of unforeseen elements into the co-design process, enriching our understanding of the present and the future.
These reflections on disruption and surrender not only helped me form a coherent argument to the program sponsor (our client) to continue supporting the program despite its obvious uncertainties, but they also helped me rethink the role of co-design practitioners themselves.
I have always carried a lingering insecurity about how to explain the contribution of a co-designer. We are not the designers best known for their drawings, their sense of color, or their mastery of algorithmic code and intricate structural geometry. Are we called co-designers because we aren't good at any of those things? For a while, I thought our main contribution was designing workshops — but anyone who excels in drawings, colors, or algorithms can also design and run workshops.
The unfolding of events at J Village, and the reflections and reactions they prompted, made me wonder: perhaps our greatest contribution as co-designers lies in our ability to creatively and meaningfully incorporate unforeseen participants and elements into the canvas of time, shaping the future situations where our co-existence unfolds.
This concludes Part 1 of the real-time reflections inspired by the events in J Village. Part 2 is expected to be shared in a few weeks, after the third and final part of the pilot program is completed.
*Kai is a pseudoname.
Reference
Akama, Yoko, Sarah Pink, and Shanti Sumartojo. 2019. Uncertainty and Possibility: New Approaches to Future Making in Design Anthropology. Reprinted. London New York, NY Oxford New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic.