Making Yading Together
Ongoing Community-based Design Practice / Nature Education / Craft Tool Design
Developed with Chengdu Clover Nature Education in Yading, Southwest China
2026 – ongoing

 How can community making connect local ecological knowledge, cultural expression, and livelihoods in a protected landscape?

 
                                                              



Living within a Protected Landscape

The project began with drawings created by local residents, through which ecological encounters, cultural memories, and understandings of place were made visible.

Rather than introducing a completely new production system, the project worked with familiar materials, accessible processes, and existing community skills.









Current Outcomes
Current outcomes include a set of craft process explorations, pattern translation experiments, handmade product prototypes, and the ongoing development of a faster physical printing tool.

The project is still in progress. The next stage will focus on testing the printing tool with local makers, refining the product workflow, and exploring how the handmade outcomes can be better presented as nature education and cultural creative products.






This project explores how design can support community members in representing their own ecological and cultural relationships. The role of design lies in creating accessible tools, shared making processes, and public interfaces through which local knowledge can continue to be interpreted and developed by the community.





Community making becomes a way of sustaining relationships among people, place, ecological knowledge, and everyday livelihoods.