Bridging the Community-Institution Divide : Multi-Level Community-Based Participatory Design for Migrant Health in China

Zhang, Linfu and Tsekleves, Emmanuel and Perez Ojeda, David and Chen, zhangfeng and Tan, Jingyuan (2026) Bridging the Community-Institution Divide : Multi-Level Community-Based Participatory Design for Migrant Health in China. In: DRS2026: Research Papers :. Proceedings of DRS . Design Research Society, GBR.

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Abstract

Co-design with marginalised communities in developing settings —and their experiential knowledge—often collides with expert rationalities and hierarchical logics in public health institutions, undermining power-sharing, sustained participation, and institutionalisation. This paper explores how co-design mediates these competing logics to bring structurally produced health injustices back into the formal institutional field of vision. Based on seven months of immersive fieldwork in Shenzhen, China’s largest migrant city, the paper analyses a social design case addressing rural–urban migrants’ psychological well-being in an informal settlement. It integrates community-based participatory research (CBPR) and co-design to initiate the process of returning public health concerns to the institutional domain through four stages: relational trust-building, macro-meso-micro social analysis, asset-based co-design, and public inquiry. Findings indicate that integrating multi-level empirical evidence with experiential knowledge enables a more persuasive response to the concerns of diverse stakeholders, thereby mitigating the community–institution divide within co-design for marginalised health issues.