Abstract
In hierarchical organizations like Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), top-down structures exacerbate employee burnout and challenge the democratic ethos of co-creation. This paper reports on a two-year Research through Design (RtD) project that navigated this tension by co-designing the Happy Doodle Toolkit (HDT), a low-tech wellness intervention. This study first surveyed burnout with 222 questionnaires and 40 interviews, then used an Analytic-Hierarchy co-creation workshop (3 psychologists, 2 executives, 2 employees) to develop the Toolkit. In a four-week pilot, 38 participants produced 152 doodle diaries and paired MBI-GS surveys; t-tests showed significant drops in emotional exhaustion and cynicism and a rise in professional efficacy. Beyond efficacy, this study interprets the impact of this co-created artefact on employees and the organisational environment through Illich’s convivial-tools lens and Actor–Network Theory. The HDT acts as a non-human agent that translates organizational goals into personal rituals, external izes internal stress into tangible artifacts, and fosters new peer-support networks. This study argues that in such contexts, the critical value of co-creation lies not merely in its immediate outcomes, but in the process itself and the sustained agency of the artifacts that persist long after the designers depart.
Keywords
Co-creation; Well-being; Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs); Actor–Network Theory
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.680
Citation
Lin, Z., Wang, B.,and Meng, J.(2025) Artifacts as Mediators: Translating Co-Creation into Organizational Well-being in Chinese SOEs, in Chang, C.-Y., and Hsu, Y. (eds.), IASDR 2025: Design Next, 02-05 December, Taiwan. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.680
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Track 6 - Co-creation
Artifacts as Mediators: Translating Co-Creation into Organizational Well-being in Chinese SOEs
In hierarchical organizations like Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), top-down structures exacerbate employee burnout and challenge the democratic ethos of co-creation. This paper reports on a two-year Research through Design (RtD) project that navigated this tension by co-designing the Happy Doodle Toolkit (HDT), a low-tech wellness intervention. This study first surveyed burnout with 222 questionnaires and 40 interviews, then used an Analytic-Hierarchy co-creation workshop (3 psychologists, 2 executives, 2 employees) to develop the Toolkit. In a four-week pilot, 38 participants produced 152 doodle diaries and paired MBI-GS surveys; t-tests showed significant drops in emotional exhaustion and cynicism and a rise in professional efficacy. Beyond efficacy, this study interprets the impact of this co-created artefact on employees and the organisational environment through Illich’s convivial-tools lens and Actor–Network Theory. The HDT acts as a non-human agent that translates organizational goals into personal rituals, external izes internal stress into tangible artifacts, and fosters new peer-support networks. This study argues that in such contexts, the critical value of co-creation lies not merely in its immediate outcomes, but in the process itself and the sustained agency of the artifacts that persist long after the designers depart.