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.
Keywords
Co-design for health; Social design; CBPR; Marginalised communities
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1535
Citation
Zhang, L., Tsekleves, E., Pérez Ojeda, D., Chen, Z., and Tan, J. (2026) Bridging the Community-Institution Divide: Multi-Level Community-Based Participatory Design for Migrant Health in China, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1535
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Bridging the Community-Institution Divide: Multi-Level Community-Based Participatory Design for Migrant Health in China
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.