Future newspapers as a participatory design tool for Chinese rural service innovation

Abstract

This paper presents a process called Future Newspapers, which aims to advance Participatory Design (PD) practices in rural China. The study draws on a service design project in a Chinese village to develop new revitalization strategies. In the project, 57 villagers organized into five social groups representing various backgrounds created five sets of future news reports of their village in the People’s Daily in 2030. The results show that the characteristics of newspaper journalism align with key service design principles, rendering Future Newspapers a distinctive PD tool. This tool could provide a framework for participants to develop and evaluate concepts for service and strategic innovation, even if they have no prior design knowledge. Moreover, it enables designers to establish a common language with the public sector. In essence, the paper highlights the role of Future Newspapers in facilitating inclusive and efficient service innovation and development of Chinese villages.

Keywords:

• Participatory design
• rural China
• service design
• social design

Introduction

Rural revitalization is a global agenda addressing the challenges of poverty, health, education, natural resources, and environmental preservation. Recently, there has been a shift in approach in developing services and strategic innovation. This shift has moved away from relying on government coordination and policy support toward bottom-up community-based development (Hospers and Syssner 2018). During this transition, designers have played a crucial role. Participatory design (PD) is applied to assist in developing rural projects involving locals and stakeholders in order to address various challenges (Drain and Sanders 2019). The participatory method is valuable for collecting various perspectives, defining unique local opportunities, and mobilising residents to contribute to the community (Lanng, Laursen, and Borg 2022). In recent years, PD methods have been popular among designers in rural China. However, they face several challenges when PD methods, originally developed within the Scandinavian context, are applied to rural China, which has different social structures and cultural factors. Rural Chinese society is an ‘acquaintance society’, a term coined by the anthropologist Fei (1992), with highly localized interpersonal relationships. Simply put, people in the community are familiar with one another but suspicious of outsiders (Bryan-Kinns, Wang, and Ji 2022). Furthermore, the hierarchical structure of intra-village dialogue, which results from ‘elder rule’, is a significant distinction between Chinese rural society and Western civil society. Based on their respect for elders and authorities, villagers are more likely to follow the voice of clan elders than to speak for themselves (Fei 1992). This structure poses challenges in establishing public spaces that foster diverse voices and collaboration. Consequently, we contend that this domain warrants further exploration and progression.

Developing service and strategic innovations is challenging for the rural and private sectors. The business sector employs the shared imagination scenario approach to develop effective future services and strategic solutions (Schoemaker 1995). Similarly, Sanoff (2011) believe that co-imagination approaches allow employees to break down team hierarchies and freely express themselves. Furthermore, co-imagining future scenarios stimulates diverse dialogue and fosters a shared mission and commitment, contributing to employees’ sense of belonging (Devos, De Blust, and Desmet 2018). Despite the recognized potential of co-imagined scenario approaches in various contexts, there remains a notable gap in research exploring their efficacy for rural strategic service innovation. This brings us to our research question: From a strategic and service design lens, how might we involve Chinese villagers in rural contexts via a collective imagination approach?

Our study is based on a case study of a service design project in Xitouying Village, which aimed to develop revitalization strategies for the village. To gain an understanding of villagers’ perspectives and local resources, we invited five social groups representing various backgrounds and ages to create future news reports envisioning their village in 2030. Five sets of fictional news reports were produced, discussed, and evaluated in the workshops. The case shows that creating the newspaper format as a specific journalism genre could provide a holistic perspective for villagers to develop concepts and strategies even if they have no prior knowledge or training in design. As a result, we present Future Newspapers as a PD process that provides a practical creation structure to develop and examine new service concepts and strategies. Moreover, we position Future Newspapers as a process of utilizing local resources for PD activities, which is the newspaper that serves a significant social and political mechanism in villagers’ life. Finally, this paper aims to enhance the capability of PD practitioners working in the rural Chinese context that requires a local and holistic touch.

Related work

Design in Chinese rural society

China has over 800,000 villages, and many villages are confronting issues such as ageing, labour shortages, inadequate public infrastructure, and cultural extinction (Liu, Zang, and Yang 2020). Developing new rural development strategies is an emerging topic among Chinese design scholars. Recently, studies have begun to consider the harm of top-down rural development strategies that ignore local characteristics and residents’ voices (Lu and de Vries 2022). However, implementation often fails due to the lack of cooperation from villagers. Villagers disapprove of the proposals they had no role in putting forward in the first place and view external experts’ opinions as detrimental to their traditions and benefits (Ku and Dominelli 2018). Contrary to the top-down approach, more researchers have suggested emphasizing locality and bottom-up perspectives in rural service and strategic innovation (Xu, Pittock, and Daniell 2021).

In line with the bottom-up approach, designers collaborate with villagers through various PD methods to create a welcoming atmosphere to gain a better understanding of residents’ missions and knowledge (Chueng-Nainby, Fassi, and Xiao 2014). After comprehending residents’ needs, visions, and local strengths, designers seek to connect with external stakeholders to develop solutions (Wang and Lou 2022). As these projects align with the vision of stakeholders and communities, they can facilitate villagers in taking action to contribute to the transformation of the village (Manzini and Rizzo 2011). Therefore, such design-led collaborative innovation projects help villagers improve their economic incomes and self-confidence and enhance their sense of belonging (Wang 2018). Manzini (2015) argued that design contributes to transforming Chinese villages from traditional communities to more open and resilient ones.

Participatory design approaches in Asian villages

As an approach originally developed in Scandinavia and mainly applied in Western contexts, the cultural context applicable to PD is often a well-literate and well-equipped community (Puri et al. 2004). However, these premises do not always apply in other cultural contexts. Hussain, Sanders, and Steinert (2012) highlighted the need to consider participants’ capacity when applying PD approaches in rural Asia, based on a case study in Cambodia. Designers should provide villagers with appropriate tools to enhance their creativity. Furthermore, Drain and Sanders (2019) suggested that the participants’ understanding of design knowledge and processes should also be considered in rural Asia. For instance, in some Asian villages, the equivalent of ‘design’ in some regional languages is ‘decoration’, such perceptions influence participants’ perceptions of design activities. A similar problem exists in rural China. Manzini and Rizzo (2011) stated that designers were accustomed to using academic or Western-style terminology and tools. When designing in rural Shanghai, they encountered a completely different language system and perception, resulting in communication difficulties. Some villagers were unfamiliar with the term design and design methods and then showed little patience during interviews and workshops (Bryan-Kinns, Wang, and Ji 2022). To address these challenges, designers developed PD activities rooted in the local cultural context, utilizing local theatre and traditional Chinese crafts to develop new products. These locally tailored PD approaches empower villagers to create suitable village strategies collaboratively.

Narratives of the collective imagination

Storytelling is a common tool in PD whereby people create stories to shape the past and future. To facilitate this process, locally accessible physical materials are often chosen, especially in rural contexts. Using local materials can improve access to local history and culture, motivate community engagement, and foster innovation (Reitsma et al. 2019; Drain and Sanders 2019). For instance, in a village in Mongolian China, Chueng-Nainby, Fassi, and Xiao (2014) encouraged villagers to improvise with natural materials such as stones and tree branches to express their vision of space. In Australia, the aboriginal designer Sheehan (2011) meticulously selected culturally significant yearn circles to foster dialogue between the community and designers, embedding indigenous knowledge.

While locality plays a role, future thinking is increasingly viewed as significantly impacting shaping collective narratives. Among these, creating future news is widely employed based on two principles. Firstly, creating future news provides a participatory template for discussing future strategies and policies. Companies like Siemens and Amazon argue that such templates offer participants a familiar structure and assist in dismantling hierarchical barriers (Rossman 2019). In the public sector, it serves as a template for citizens to play the role of civic designer in discussing future policy (Tsekleves et al. 2019; Woods et al. 2020). In addition, Huybrechts, Hendriks, and Martens (2017) introduced counterfactual narratives, which provide a space for residents and policymakers to share power in co-producing future scenarios. Secondly, multiple distinguished future images also serve as speculative prototypes to reveal tension and friction among policymakers and residents (Mete 2022; Nabuurs et al. 2023). However, such tension simultaneously supports policymakers in coming closer to comprehending residents’ lived experiences and fosters empathy and mutual understanding (Tsekleves et al. 2019).

Case

Context

In 2017, the Chinese central government proposed the ‘Rural Vitalization Strategy’ to promote the overall economic, social, and cultural development of rural areas while keeping a harmonious relationship with the ecological environment (Liu, Zang, and Yang 2020). Due to the increasing impact of social media influencers, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the People’s Republic of China (MCTPRC) saw the potential of promoting villages on social media. Thus, in 2021, they proposed a ‘Village Influencer’ scheme inspired by the term ‘social media influencer’, which aimed to bring visitors to villages via media channels, such as TikTok. To start, they selected two villages in Hebei Province as pilot villages. One of these villages was Xitouying Village, where the design project presented in this paper was conducted (Figure 1). It was chosen because it is a mediocre village of average size (15 square kilometres, 1,900 inhabitants), with a median GDP (an annual per capita income of RMB 8,807 in 2021) and no distinctive feature in terms of industry and culture.

Figure 1. A social gathering place for villagers (left); A view of the countryside (right).

An executive team from the Chinese Folk Literature and Art Association (CFLAA) started planning for Xitouying Village in May 2021 and suggested painting graffiti on village walls to attract visitors to take videos and share them on social media channels. They invested 38 million RMB and recruited 50 university students to paint all the main walls in the village. However, the graffiti walls did not attract as many visitors or social media attention as expected. Based on this criterion, MCTPRC stated that this project failed to revitalize the village. Hence, a department head of the CFLAA invited a service design team with three key members (the team lead is the first author) to Xitouying Village to develop a workable strategic plan based on local villagers’ vision and local resources and strengths instead of top-down central planning from the CFLAA.

In 2021, the design team entered the village and stayed for three months (Figure 2). They started with informal hangouts with villagers and participated in community events to gain an insider’s understanding of daily life, work, and leisure in the village. After that, they held one-to-one interviews with 18 villagers about their opinions and visions for the future. They continued with three workshops on creating future news reports of their village in the People’s Daily in 2030 with 57 village participants. After the workshops, they interviewed village officers to obtain their opinions on the workshops. In all, this project built collaboration between the local government, the external public sector, villagers, and several other stakeholders (Figure 3).

Figure 2. Overview of the project process.

Figure 3. The stakeholder map of the design project.

Developing the idea of future newspapers

The idea of composing future news reports in the People’s Daily was developed from the fieldwork. In consultation meetings and interviews, the design team did not manage to have productive conversations. In meetings, it was often the case that the senior official gave a speech, which was then followed with silence. One official explained later that some villagers kept quiet out of fear that their opinions would be ignored or laughed at. Some voices were inclined to follow the senior’s speech if not quiet. One-to-one interviews were not successful either. When asked to share special things about their village, villagers often displayed an embarrassed face and exclaimed, ‘Sorry, there is nothing here’. They faced difficulty in articulating anything special about their home place. Moreover, the overall reaction was pessimistic when asked to envision a better future for the village.

Thus, the design team needed to better engage villagers with dialogues. They got inspiration from the villagers’ passion for newspaper coverage. Some villagers proudly mentioned that their village had been reported in some media. When a journalist visited the village, many villagers were eager to participate in his interviews, hoping to be part of the report. Also, the CFLAA executive team mentioned that media coverage indicates the success of a project. Based on these observations, the design team saw newspapers as a promising engagement tool to motivate villagers to participate and express their views. And they chose the People’s Daily as the channel, China’s largest state-run newspaper and a trusted source of information for many Chinese people. It was chosen because villagers were familiar with this newspaper and knew it was an honour to be in it.

Three workshops of future newspapers with older adults, middle-aged adults, and children

To acquire village-specific knowledge and heterogenous voices, three workshops were organized to create future news reports for the People’s Daily in 2030, involving 57 participants divided into five groups (G1–G5) (Figure 2). The five groups were thoughtfully chosen to encompass a range of ages, professional backgrounds, and educational levels. All three workshops provided the same People’s Daily template of ‘Xitouying Village is the most _____ village in 2030’, along with the village map (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Future newspaper template (left) and the village map supplied in the workshops (right).

Workshop One engaged two groups (G1–G2) of 15 older adults (aged 79–91). The six participants from G1 were labourers working in cement production, construction, and security. They had experienced the prosperity that a dried fruit factory brought to the village a decade ago and wished to recreate the same success in 2030 (FN1-Factory) (Figure 5). The nine participants from G2 were the representatives of nine farming production teams. Some participated in the Graffiti Project and appreciated the connection with outside university students. Developed from that sense of satisfaction, they envisioned a successful graffiti project where university students played a bigger role (FN2-Graffiti) (Figure 5). After the workshop, the design team took the two pieces of news to the street and showed them to the people they met. Surprisingly, some people who had not attended the workshop could immediately comment on the stories and share their opinions.

Figure 5. Older adult participants were creating future news in Workshop One (left); Two pieces of future news reports (right).

After Workshop One, the design team found the format of creating newspapers efficient and a meaningful way to gain villagers’ views and, thus, decided to organize more sessions. Having engaged older adults, they targeted younger participants. That week, they coincided with the traditional Moon Festival, when many expatriate villagers returned to visit families. The design team realized that their knowledge and experience would be important. Therefore, they planned Workshop Two. They asked a local businessman to help recruit ten villagers (aged 35–60). The workshop took place in the recruiter’s living room one evening, with tea and snacks provided. It followed the same process, with the same tasks and template as the first workshop. The five participants from G3 were respected teachers who hosted local wedding ceremonies. They proposed an ethnic museum exhibiting the unique ethnic identity of Han-Manchu-Mongo in the village that had been neglected in the formal archive (FN3-Museum) (Figure 6). The other five participants from G4 had long worked in big cities or overseas. With their knowledge of successful cases overseas, they speculated on a high-end cottage complex that attracted many tourists (FN4-Cottage).

Figure 6. Discussion in the living room in Workshop Two (left); Two pieces of future news reports (right).

After engaging with older and middle-aged adults, the design team noticed that 24.7% of the resident population were children under the age of 15. Thus, it was crucial to integrate children’s vision. Accordingly, a third workshop was organized with 32 4th year primary school students (aged 10–13). The children were divided into eight groups and generated eight future news reports. Almost all fictitious reports, which portrayed beautiful natural scenes and outdoor activities, are illustrated in Figure 7B. These illustrations were created based on the eight reports. In addition to appreciating the existing natural scenery, the children added their fantasy.

Figure 7. In Workshop Three, children were discussing (A at top left); The village map of created future news reports (B at bottom left) and eight pieces of future news reports (right).

Continuation of the workshops

After learning about the village’s vision and resources from the future news reports, the design team proposed integrating local cultural resources with village development. They identified the three most potential cases of developing unique hotels, early education programs with external colleague students as voluntary teachers, and light-industry factories. More specifically, they identified active participants in the workshops as potential key stakeholders. The team presented their proposal to village officers and the CFLAA team, along with the fictional news reports as supplementary material. The CFLAA team was surprised to learn about the previous success and villagers’ enthusiasm regarding the fruit factory from FN1-Factory. This led to a shift from the previous focus on developing fertilizer factories in heavy industries to light-industry factories. Additionally, the identified potential stakeholders from FN4-Cottage and children’s fictions from FN5-Nature confirmed their interest in developing tourism projects.

One year after the project’s completion, the first author reached out to the village again and interviewed nine workshop participants covering all five groups. The follow-up interview was conducted by phone and video call, asking about what had happened and their thoughts after the creation of future news reports. All nine remembered the fictional news they created one year ago. Two participants who created FN4-Cottage remained engaged and continued their discussions on the action plan during the year. Meanwhile, the participant who created FN1-Factory expressed his disappointment in not seeing any implementation.

Four features of composing and examining future newspapers

Having shown the creation process of the future reports of Xitouying Village in 2030, next we present four features of the created future news reports, covering the aspects of content, participants’ way of composition and examination.

From an apologetic face of ‘nothingness’ to the hope that it is ‘worth reporting’

First, participants were aware that if a project was reported in the People’s Daily, it was a symbol of success. Thus, in creating success stories, participants showed their confidence in their village and the future, a feature observed as missing among villagers. As previously mentioned, during interviews, villagers displayed apologetic faces, declaring nothing special in their village. However, during the workshop, they adopted a positive attitude. The Graffiti Project’s executive team leader also noticed the contrast:

How do we want to be reported in the People’s Daily after 10 years? It is a very good question. I often heard villagers sighing, ‘Who knows if our village will still exist after ten years’? Confidence was rarely seen in this village. However, look at this fictional news. (They) show so much confidence—a big difference from the conversations I had with them.

Further, as the village chief reflected, another value was that it encouraged villagers to dare to dream: ‘You know what the best part of this event is? (…) to show us that you can try in life. Most of us do not even dare to imagine giving things a try.’ Furthermore, such dreams were not daydreams or obscure fantasies, such as winning a big fortune on the lottery or gambling that some villagers would do. The imagination of the success was grounded and substantial because it was about some achievement worth reporting in the People’s Daily.

Triple sides of the success

The second feature is the distinctive type of success constructed in future newspapers. We identified triple sides, which were shared by us, recognized by the top and appreciated by others. Moreover, the three sides existed at the same time. This quality of success guided participants to speculate on the success beyond their limit.

To start with, by knowing that success belonged to all villagers, participants prioritized collective pride over individual gains and losses. This priority was rare. In interviews, villagers could not stop talking about their personal incomes and living expenses when asked about the village’s future development. A member of the Graffiti Project’s executive team also highlighted the challenge of guiding villagers to think beyond their perspective:

Frankly speaking, villagers couldn’t care less about their village. They only care about themselves or, more precisely, their kids. When they are healthy, they just want to farm more to bring in more money for their kids; when they are not healthy, they just hope to die quickly without burdening their kids. So, this news is very surprising to me.

The other two sides of the success were relational. Being reported by China’s most influential and official newspapers means the central authority recognized the success. Meanwhile, the success was seen through the appreciation of people from other villages. The three pieces of fiction (FN1-Factory, FN2-Graffiti, and FN4-Cottage) emphasised the ability to attract outside visitors as part of the success. The relational perspective, which is from the top and others, is crucial in creating future news reports. Embracing a positive attitude towards the top and others was expected to bring external resources, such as investment from governments or companies and consumption of visitors, which would directly benefit the village’s development.

The position of I within we

As we have analysed, the protagonist of the fictional news was the collective we. This section looks at how adult participants constructed the individual I within the collective pride in three ways. These are heterogeneous perspectives, the win-win result and self-initiated ownership, which all indicate a harmonious and balanced relationship between I and we.

Firstly, each of the five groups contributed their unique experiences and knowledge to the questions about village revitalization. More importantly, the five reports displayed a new perspective previously unseen by the authorities. In FN1-Factory, participants brought their living experience as beneficiary witnesses of a successful dried fruit factory in the past, which the younger village authority was not familiar with. In FN2-Graffiti, participants expressed their appreciation of the social connection with college student volunteers in the Graffiti Project. It provided a local perspective to the evaluation process. Otherwise, the project was evaluated by the outside executive team as a failure due to the shortage of visitors. The people who created FN3-Museum enriched the village’s historical, cultural identity by expanding it from Han ethnicity to the mixed identity of Han-Manchu-Mongo. During the workshop, a participant brought his personal Manchurian genealogy chart and title deed from his ancestor’s shrine. These were undoubtedly cultural heritage items, which the local historical museum did not document. The expatriate villagers (FN4-Cottage), with their education and work experience from overseas and in Chinese metropolises, applied successful examples of rural revitalization in other countries to their home village. Finally, children viewed their village from the vantage of natural scenery and entertainment. Their appreciation lay with the natural scenery, which adults neglected.

Secondly, all fictions portrayed win-win scenarios for both the village and individual villagers. This is most evident in FN1-Factory, where the success of the factory is the result of the collective efforts of various stakeholders: wealthy investors, supportive ministries, hardworking villagers, and returning young labourers. However, even within this collaborative narrative, participants with a working-class background did not neglect their role. They created characters of shareholder workers with substantial annual income.

Thirdly, some adult participants actively positioned themselves as potential contributors to reality and deliberated on how to utilize their resources for the betterment of the village. The self-initiatives related to FN4-Cottage were particularly notable. Their discussion thoroughly encompassed the required resources, including land, design and capital, manufacturing and operational costs, and potential risks. Several days later, they visited a Family Farming Fair and sought advice from their experienced friends.

Embedded structure of evaluation

Lastly, soon after the creation, without the designers’ request, adult participants self-examined their fictional projects and developed critical comments. Their way of evaluation was based on the criterion of whether this project would be reported in the People’s Daily. Below, we summarize three key criteria that participants used for assessment, which are novelty, reproducibility, and political alignment.

First, participants primarily valued the project’s novelty as they understood only novel ideas would be reported in the People’s Daily. For instance, a participant explicitly pointed out the little reported value of FN1-Factory because too many similar projects have been done in China. Similarly, a participant criticized FN2-Graffiti for the lack of novelty of their graffiti wall idea because he learnt from news that some Taiwanese villages had already started to draw on their grounds.

Secondly, the scalability of the reported projects was important because other villages should easily replicate them. This requirement was highlighted by the MCTPRC department head when she happened to visit the village during Workshop One. She pointed out the non-scalability of the concept in FN1-Factory because the factory’s success was largely dependent on the huge investment of a company, which would be rare to find.

The third requirement is political alignment. As the People’s Daily is the central government’s voice, all content is aligned with, represents, or promotes the ideologies of the government. In this regard, participants showed a great level of political sensitivity. In the discussion on the FN3-Museum, one participant was worried that the history of Han-Manchu-Mongo was related to a history of slavery and not politically aligned with the current, formalized ideology.

A newspaper mechanism for guiding service innovation

In a Chinese village, we have developed a tool that engages individuals from diverse backgrounds, empowering them to create future news reports about their communities. This initiative helped us uncover innovative concepts for rural revitalization. On the one hand, as a PD tool, Future Newspapers shares certain core principles with PD practice. These principles include fostering a democratic and welcoming atmosphere for conversations (Heiss and Kokshagina 2021), staging for heterogeneous voices to emerge (Björgvinsson, Ehn, and Hillgren 2012), injecting confidence and pride among villagers (Trischler et al. 2018), and actively involving participants in the transformation process (Manzini 2015).

On the other hand, Future Newspapers possesses distinct characteristics of the future newspaper journalism genre that set it apart as a distinctive PD tool. The journalism genre emphasizes the objectivity paradigm and adheres to criteria such as novelty, timeliness, and brevity (Jaakkola 2018). Next, we highlight the similarities between the journalism genre features and some key principles of service innovation. Drawing on these similarities, we argue that Future Newspapers provides a practical framework for guiding participants in developing and evaluating new service concepts and strategies for revitalization. This remains true even for participants with limited design expertise. This argument is supported by our findings, which indicate that the four groups of adults applied their knowledge of what is required for writing a commendation in the People’s Daily. At the same time, the child participants, due to their unfamiliarity with newspapers, did not produce the typical type.

Firstly, Future Newspapers could facilitate participants to develop a holistic view of multiple stakeholders beyond personal gains and pains. When envisioning future scenarios, individuals often focus on their concerns, making it challenging to envision the community’s common good or the bigger society (Bryan-Kinns, Wang, and Ji 2022). However, such a one-sided perspective is inadequate in composing a People’s Daily news report. All adult participants knew they were tasked with generating ideas for a national newspaper that only reports significant events achieved through unity. This awareness prompted participants to portray the collaborative efforts of multiple stakeholders vividly. The concept of ‘triple sides of success’ in fictional news reports necessitates cultivating a stakeholder network characterized by productive and balanced relationships. This holistic and systemic viewpoint aligns closely with the fundamental principles of service design (Penin 2018). To delve deeper, service design significantly emphasizes encouraging diverse stakeholders from various backgrounds to engage in the creative process actively. It particularly underscores cultivating mutually beneficial relationships with institutions, communities, and society at large (Trischler et al. 2018). Furthermore, service design emphasises value co-creation, wherein all participants benefit from the outcome through resource integration and exchange (Sangiorgi et al. 2019).

Secondly, the quality requirement of news reports could offer participants a structured framework for evaluating service design projects. When evaluating a service case, Trischler et al. (2018) suggested three evaluation dimensions of user benefit, feasibility, and novelty based on the Consensus Assessment Technique. Moreover, the Design Council (2022) argued that any socially engaged design should speak to socio-cultural, environmental, democratic, and economic values. In our case, participants assessed projects based on five key factors: economic and social benefits, novelty, scalability, and political alignments. This evaluation framework exhibits a high degree of consistency with the two service design evaluation metrics while also introducing an additional perspective - scalability.

Thirdly, while future news is speculative, the journalistic genre mandates incorporating fact-based and objective content. With an awareness of this non-fictional requirement, participants engaged in speculative processes grounded in factual information. This inherent quality not only could avoid imagining magical or unrealistic scenarios but also provide the design team with valuable fact-based knowledge about the village. We propose that this tool could be utilized as a supplementary method for efficiently amassing substantial village information, complementing the more time-consuming ethnographic approach, which is commonly used in mainstream research methodologies.

Finally, the language employed in the news media has the potential to surmount the barrier that hinders design from entering the public sector. This barrier is largely due to a lack of mutual understanding between the design field and the public sector. Clarke and Craft (2019) assert that designers are unfamiliar with administrative language, whereas civil servants are unfamiliar with design pedagogy. However, civil servants master translating bureaucratic language into the language of news media to achieve social influence and deliver positive images to the public (Thorbjornsrud, Figenschou, and Ihlen 2014). Additionally, they exhibit a strong inclination towards media influence (Strömbäck 2008), consistent with the village’s high interest in media coverage in our study. Therefore, harnessing news media has the potential to foster active participation by civil servants, villagers, and other stakeholders in PD processes.

Conclusion

Xitouying Village is one of the countless villages in northern China. From both an economic and cultural standpoint, it is a mediocre village, described as a ‘nothing here’ place by its villagers. Therefore, what is the future of the village? This paper explores a PD process known as Future Newspapers, which serves as a framework for collective discussion on future visions and revitalization strategies in rural China. Our study provides a detailed analytic account of how the journalism genre characterizes Future Newspapers as a distinctive PD process, especially in the context where design pedagogy is lacking. The basic component of ‘Future Newspapers’ is a familiar and crucial mechanism within the local social and political media landscape. Our study demonstrates that the newspaper genre, particularly national or municipal news media with a strong reputation in the community that reports on novel and significant events, is appropriate for the Future Newspapers framework. Firstly, national newspaper like the People’s Daily provides a structured framework for developing concepts related to service and strategic innovation, aligning with the key service design principles. The process of constructing a news report enables participants to transition from an individual mindset to a more harmonious and productive relationship between I and we. Furthermore, it provides a successful model for village revitalization that includes triple sides: benefiting us, being recognized, promoted, and invested by the top, and being consumed and replicated by others. Secondly, the stringent quality standards associated with news reports provide a systematic structure for evaluating service design projects, considering novelty, reproducibility, and political alignment.

Our study has demonstrated the value of Future Newspapers in rural China. It advances PD practice in two ways. Originating from the journalism genre and aligning with service design principles, Future Newspapers assists PD practitioners in establishing a common language with the public sector. Through this shared language, designers are better poised to collaborate with stakeholders, gain support, and mitigate misunderstandings as they navigate the course of project development. This is especially pertinent in contexts such as Chinese rural governance, where the lexicon of design may be notably absent. Moreover, Future Newspapers enriches and expands upon the practice of incorporating local materials in PD by introducing the novel concept of media artifacts. We suggest designers pay attention to vital political, social, and economic media mechanisms that are widely embraced within the community. By doing so, the existing knowledge of the community regarding the social, economic, and political dimensions associated with the chosen newspaper could be efficiently harnessed and translated into valuable design insights.

Furthermore, to enhance the impact of Future Newspapers on the public sector and the community, we suggest two processes for further research. Firstly, there is a need to integrate the process of creating and disseminating fictional narratives more seamlessly within the existing communication infrastructure of the community. In this context, communication infrastructure refers to a network of storytelling deeply embedded in local contexts and nurtured by local narratives (Kim and Ball-Rokeach 2006). For instance, activities could be planned within the formal and informal distribution networks of the newspaper and news. We strongly encourage designers to actively participate in informal social occasions, such as dining in villagers’ homes and casual chats on the streets. These often-overlooked interactions are particularly significant in the context of the ‘acquaintance society’ prevalent in rural China. The second process aims to foster ‘a strong design space’ in the public sector, described as ‘high institutional recognition and stakeholders’ involvement’ by Mortati (2019). The familiarity of Future Newspapers’ local media materials holds the promise of nurturing a strong design space. This can be achieved by establishing task force groups consisting of village officials and proactive community members dedicated to advancing the narratives crafted through Future Newspapers into tangible prototypes and real-world implementations. In essence, our research has highlighted the pivotal role played by Future Newspapers in facilitating inclusive and efficient rural service innovation. To further bridge the domains of participatory design, media communication, and community engagement, we anticipate that the transformative potential of Future Newspapers can be more profoundly harnessed within Chinese villages. Ultimately, this can contribute to advancing service innovation and development that aligns with villagers’ aspirations and needs.

Disclosure statement

There are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ziwei Lin

Ziwei Lin is a PhD candidate at Service Futures Lab, the University of the Arts London, where her research interests revolve around Participatory Design, Speculative Design, and Service Design in the public sector. She is dedicated to advancing design practices that have a profound societal impact.

Yiying Wu

Bow Yiying Wu is a Lecturer in Social Design at the University of Sydney, School of Architecture, Planning and Design. Before moving to Australia, she worked at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Aalto University. Her research interests are design anthropology, design fiction.