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


About the  Project

This is an ongoing eco-cultural design practice developed in the context of nature education and community craft training in Yading, Southwest China. The project explores how local ecological stories, villagers’ drawings, and accessible handmade processes can be transformed into cultural creative products that support public engagement and potential livelihood opportunities for local communities.

My current role focuses on designing practical making tools and promotional cultural products that better fit the villagers’ working conditions. This includes developing a faster and easier physical printing tool for pattern transfer, as well as designing product prototypes and communication materials that can help local handmade products become more consistent, reproducible, and publicly recognisable. 
                                                              




Yading is known for its distinctive mountain landscape, local Tibetan culture, and rich ecological narratives. In this project, cultural creative design was used as a bridge between nature education, community participation, and protected area storytelling.

The starting point was not to create a finished visual identity from the designer’s perspective, but to work with materials that had already emerged from local participation, including villagers’ drawings, ecological motifs, and craft-based making possibilities.





01

Local Drawings as Starting Points  02

Translating Ecological Motifs into Patterns 03

Developing a Low-threshold Making Process 04

Community Workshop and Product Assembly




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.





Reflection
For me, this project is not only about designing cultural creative products, but about designing the conditions that make local making more possible.

By working with villagers’ drawings, accessible craft techniques, physical printing tools, and nature education contexts, the project explores how design can support a more practical connection between protected area storytelling, local livelihood, and more-than-human environments.

The value of the project lies in this ongoing process of translation: from ecological experience to drawing, from drawing to pattern, from pattern to tool, from tool to handmade product, and from product to public-facing nature education.




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