Collaborative Design Intervention in the Traditional Chinese Handicraft Sector for Enhancing Cultural Sustainability: New Channel Social Innovation Project

Background Rapid industrialization brought new challenges to the handicraft sector. Recently, it has been a significant concern for designers to preserve the traditional handicraft industry and to develop cultural sustainability. A culturally sustainable future is faced on how to blend traditional handicraft and contemporary social needs. This paper aims to study the status of collaborative design intervention in the traditional handicraft domain in order to investigate characteristics and potentials of the design processes, as well as to suggest the developmental tendency of Chinese handicraft on improving cultural sustainability.Methods First, to identify existing problems, literature related to the traditional Chinese handicraft was reviewed and outlined. Second, to improve cultural sustainability, three representative projects of the “New Channel Social Innovation Project” that play a prominent role in the collaborative design intervention model in the Chinese handicraft sector, were selected for comparative analysis by investigating official websites and formal documents. The characteristics of the design model were based on the results. Third, to verify the consequences, the research of the features specific to the collaborative design and the future direction were followed through a comprehensive comparison with relevant expert theory.Results The results of this study indicate the advantages of the collaborative design intervention method. Three commonalities were uncovered: strategically promote intangible cultural heritage protection; actively adopt the “rethinking and making” procedure before adjusting the design; and follow diverse “interdisciplinary methods” to find a creative solution. The findings reveal the crucial knowledge that the function, by design, in social and cultural issues is not to offer a solution unilaterally but to engage in the environment for drawing bidirectional communication with group members. By employing the comprehensive comparison with a "transition design" concept, a relevant expert theory suggests the significant ways for the transition to the culturally sustainable future. The results show that the future goal of Chinese handicraft is to achieve cultural sustainability based on locality knowledge through collaborative design.Conclusions This research allows us to have a deep understanding of the current situation of collaborative design intervention in the Chinese handicraft sector and the enthusiasm of a collaborative design intervention method for enhancing cultural sustainability. Furthermore, the study presents a critical argument of the design ways, which is the formulated strategies in interdisciplinary collaborations to enhance cultural sustainability. This study demonstrates that for improving cultural sustainability of the handicraft domain, the design processes and characteristics of collaborative design intervention in traditional handicrafts are of great significance.