Designing for a Real Society

Story of Zhou Zishu

My name is Zhou Zishu, and I come from the School of Design at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

In 2008 I was working at the National Art Museum of China when I had the chance to travel with UNDP to the site of the Wenchuan earthquake. A car took us to what looked like an empty open field; at first I felt nothing unusual. Then they told me: “You’re not standing on flat ground — this used to be a valley.”

When the earthquake struck, the two mountains collapsed within five minutes and buried the entire village. Beneath my feet, hundreds of meters underground, lay a village where hundreds of people had lost their lives in an instant. The shock of that realization was overwhelming.

After I returned to Beijing, I spent a year curating an exhibition called Du — International Emergency Architecture Design Exhibition, inviting fifteen architectural teams from around the world. Each was asked to design emergency shelters for different countries’ natural disasters within their own systems of values and beliefs.

The Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto created A Piece of House — a single plastic sheet that could unfold into a temporary living space.

A romantic French architect said, “We don’t have natural disasters, only homelessness,” so he designed a tiny trailer exactly the size of a European parking space.

A Swedish architect designed a “quake table” that people could crawl beneath and wait a week for rescue; he stocked it with water, chocolate, a first-aid kit, and even a copy of Playboy — because survival, he said, should still preserve dignity.

But in real life, no architect will appear the moment a quake begins. What can ordinary people do? A Chilean architect offered an answer: dig a pit, fill it with firewood, plaster it with mud, poke a few holes, light a fire — and you’ll have a clay hut.

On May 12 2009, the first anniversary of the Wenchuan earthquake, the exhibition opened successfully. It carried me through my thirtieth birthday and gave me direction in my confusion. Soon after, I resigned.

I was still lost when, one day in a shopping mall eating ice-cream with a friend, someone tapped my shoulder. It was Professor Han Yan from CAFA. She said, “A school in Britain is looking for someone who’s both designer and curator for a one-year master’s program. Interested?”

“OK,” I said.

The day before my IELTS exam, CAFA’s official Weibo announced that Professor Han had passed away from cancer. It struck me deeply. A person on the verge of death had left not pain but hope for someone younger. I decided: for her, I must go.

I applied to Central Saint Martins for a second master’s degree — Narrative Environments.

One day I saw a BBC report: while preparing to build an underground supermarket in Manchester, workers discovered a Victorian-era basement where people had once lived. Later I learned that after the First Industrial Revolution, vast waves of immigrants flooded British cities; Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844–45), described in detail how people dwelled in those underground warrens.

America, too, had its “mole people.” Their stories were similar.

And I thought of Beijing. A city drawing migrants from across the country — most employed in service work, living on the outskirts. With the last buses at 10 p.m. and subways at 11, many couldn’t return home and ended up living underground.

That became my thesis topic: the lives of Beijing’s basement residents — the invisible migrants beneath the city.

When I began fieldwork, I tried to rent a basement room to observe life there. Most people mistook me for a reporter and refused. The photos I took were all secret, half hidden. Eventually I found one basement in Huajiadi, Wangjing.

Down a long corridor, the main hallway was dim; the branching halls were lined with clothes. Sometimes the underground residents hung their laundry in the above-ground courtyards, which caused the first real conflicts between those living above and those below.

Forty people shared two toilets and a card-swipe shower.

On the walls were carvings — like one that read: No matter how hard it gets or how far the distance, I won’t let go.

Old coat hooks of different shapes lined the walls like a gallery of expressions.

The entrance door of the building was constantly broken — repaired ten times, broken ten times — because the basement tenants had no key while the residents upstairs did. Arguments, even kicking and hammering the door, were common.

I met the landlord and asked whether I could rent a room to do an art project. It was the first time he’d heard of such a thing. We talked for two hours; he was doubtful but refused.

When I returned a second time, a carpet had appeared at his door. He said, “After you came last time, I thought a lot. I talked with my wife and daughter. I’m thirty now. Maybe it’s time to change something.” He rented me the small room where he used to play video games.

He even took me to other basements to talk with landlords and introduced me to many young underground residents. But I couldn’t knock on every door, so I began sweeping the floors. By sweeping, I could quietly observe subtle changes in the space — and people grew used to me.

From the shoes outside each door I learned that every 3–5 square-meter room usually held one or two people.

One man, an Audi mechanic, told me something I still remember: “People now are so boring — all they think about is houses, cars, and women.” He wanted to study new energy.

Another was a boiler worker who’d spent 9,100 yuan on a three-month Photoshop course after hearing that graphic design paid well. He finished it, realized he couldn’t become a designer, and went back to tending boilers. He even wrote a note titled “The Two Traps of Life” — one, comparing yourself to others; two, proving yourself. It seemed simple, but I thought: isn’t that what all of us do?

Gradually the residents trusted me. They invited me to their BBQs. There I understood — they didn’t only wish for better rooms; they longed for career growth. But with little social capital, few had access to knowledge or resources.

So I thought: what if we create a skills-exchange project down here — let those with experience mentor new arrivals, one-hour at a time?

We tested it.

Xiao Zhou, a software engineer with a background in psychology, wanted to combine therapy with body work.

Xiao Zhao, a foot massage therapist who’d studied computing, wanted to learn programming.

We split a bed into two chairs, turned the space between into a therapy site, and they began their first skills exchange.

Afterward, both said it was a fascinating experience but hoped the room could be redesigned for comfort. I wanted to paint it completely white, but one resident stopped me:

“Could you not paint it all white? When we make money, we want to go home and build a house. Could you paint it like a house instead?”

So we did. The white walls below represented dreams; the unpainted roof above represented reality.

A chef from a grilled-fish shop brought us bananas as a gift — a small gesture that showed the community was beginning to trust us.

We also organized photography workshops — helping families take portraits, even first-ever family photos. Some were couples, some single.

Every night I went back to chat. They were people with dreams, not the “rat tribe” the media described. They told me, maybe our next step is to change how people perceive these basements.We began the next stage of transformation.

We painted the basement door the same color as the building’s outer wall, making it look like a natural main entrance rather than something hidden. Then we duplicated the basement’s sign and subtly modified the character “下” (down). Behind it we installed two tiny motors. At first it looked unchanged, but after a while the sign gently shifted—sometimes reading “地下室” (underground room), sometimes “地上室” (above-ground room). It quietly invited people to rethink what was “below” and what was “above.”

Originally the basement had been cut into dozens of isolated boxes; people easily lost their sense of direction. So we re-imagined it as a vertical tower—a “skyscraper underground.” The first level became the Ground Floor, clearly marked.

Main corridors were numbered with Arabic digits. At night, returning workers saw warm yellow light; in the morning, on their way out, they walked through hopeful blue.

We didn’t care about making it beautiful; what mattered was building a sustainable rhythm that could draw people from the surface down into conversation.

In the redesigned plan, the upper area was for small studios to rent; the lower area for temporary living by young migrants; and the central black zone became classrooms for skill exchange and self-study. We also reserved open space for the residents above to use together with those below.

The real question was how a public community space could be shared and governed collectively. That was the earliest core idea of what later became Digua Community.

We wanted the space itself to attract more young people. We built a small wooden house whose panels could unfold into furniture, and we invited others to hold workshops, testing how people interacted with the environment. We even created an underground cinema.

By then my graduate project was finished. When I returned to China at the end of 2014, I found messages waiting on Weibo. One was from a post-80s generation official—then the director of the Asian Games Village Subdistrict Office. He said they had a 500-square-meter space and asked if I wanted to design it into a complete underground community. I thought it was a wonderful idea. With funding support from Feng Lun, we could finally turn many of our thoughts into reality.

At Christmas we built a “Christmas Road” from discarded branches and wood, refurbished old tricycles, and let every resident vote with instant Polaroid photos—because a public space shouldn’t be dictated by designers alone.

That was Digua No. 1. We collected 187 votes from the community.

We designed a coherent interior with a large way-finding system. Ventilation mattered, so we 3-D-printed custom nodes, turning air ducts into floating sculptures. Each room had its own number for future management.

Later came Digua No. 3, directly opposite CAFA’s north gate. It added a community gallery and library; CAFA artists began to display their works there. We hoped art would meet everyday life and create new sparks. But more important than art or form was the idea that spatial renovation exists to change people.

Digua’s mission was to reactivate idle spaces, attract participation, generate public goods, and offer services at an affordable cost.

The project was difficult. I remember in early 2014 my tutor told me, “Spencer, your project will take at least ten years before you see results.” He handed me a letter labeled To be opened in 2024.

Now almost six years have passed. I don’t know if Digua Community will still exist four years from now, but I’m confident. I want to open that letter in 2024—perhaps even invite him to Digua—to see what ten years of perseverance have become.

Digua had always cared for Beijing’s young migrants, yet in recent years living underground was prohibited. Many of them returned to their hometowns. Digua wanted to become a bridge between city and countryside, so two years ago I turned my eyes toward rural China.

We focused on the Hu Huanyong Line, which divides China demographically; most fragile ecosystems and poor villages lie along it. We chose Pingwu County as our research and design entry point.

I realized how little I actually knew about the countryside. Driving there, a long tunnel felt like a telescope pulling me into a different world.

Pingwu is known as the first county of giant pandas and holds deep cultural history. There’s an old city wall, and the Bao’en Temple, a Ming-dynasty palace-style complex that is Tsinghua University’s teaching base—called the cradle of dougong for its 21 types of bracket sets.

We met the local Baima Tibetan families—warm, laughing, and generous.

We conducted detailed surveys of poor households. Many parents said their greatest wish was for their children to leave the village. They resisted living with their grown children because illness cost too much; they felt old, resigned, unwilling to farm.

Grass-roots officials told us they had only power to execute, not to decide, while villagers accused them of not securing benefits—both trapped between responsibility and limitation.

Teenagers said, “All my friends moved to the county town. There’s nothing fun here. I probably won’t come back.”

I still remember two local advertisements: ‘All your classmates have gone to Mianyang. What about you?’ and ‘A flat in Mianyang makes it easier to find a wife.’

We gave a lecture at Pingwu High School about art-college entrance, collecting precise data on local education: in the past five years, numbers in kindergarten through high school had all declined, and after graduation most young people left. The ones who returned were already around thirty—they weren’t returning youth but returning middle-youth, drawn back by family ties. They wanted ecological protection and economic development to coexist.

Local entrepreneurs lacked opportunity, torn between survival and ideals. For the elderly and infirm, targeted welfare was needed; but the essence of poverty relief lay in industrial revitalization.

We studied the county’s economic shifts—from hunting to logging, hydropower, smelting, and now tourism. Yet officials’ performance metrics valued GDP, not visitor numbers, limiting progress.

The Baima Tibetans had a long beekeeping tradition. Honey became our entry point.

We learned of a peculiar policy: if bears stole five or more boxes of honey, the government compensated the loss. But bears rarely stole that many, so farmers with smaller losses got nothing—discouraging them from keeping bees.

During research we met Li Xinrui, a former tank soldier turned beekeeper. As we spoke, I discovered he had once lived in a basement near Beijing Foreign Studies University five years earlier—instantly strengthening my trust in him.

He led us deep into the forest, a four-hour hike to his hives. Those four hours took me physically away from the city and mentally closer to the heart of the countryside.

His biggest hope was better branding and packaging for his honey. Data later showed that rural cooperatives’ second-greatest need, after funding, was packaging design. So we began there.

Back in Beijing we gathered every honey package on the market and invited young designers to analyze and brainstorm improvements.

Our inspiration came from Pingwu’s traditional wild honeycomb—the earliest, most natural form. From that we designed a corrugated-paper package that unfolded like an old hive. With support from Ant Financial and Ant Forest, we launched it online: ten thousand bottles sold in one hour the first time, and in one minute the second.

The numbers weren’t huge, but they gave returning middle-aged villagers a glimpse of new industrial possibility. Still, we knew: designing a single product couldn’t lift a village from poverty.

We looked to Japan’s D&Department Project, which gathers regional products from across the country into one Tokyo store—a long-term, sustainable brand of local design. It inspired us to work toward the same for Pingwu.

We returned to meet local young leaders and discuss how to build rural branding. One volunteer, Xu Hengli from NYU, had left a good job in America to spend a year in Pingwu. He helped us quantify every natural asset of the village, teaching me a great deal.

We searched for unique products that could be re-designed for the future: a beautifully shaped bamboo winnow that looked almost German in design; a handmade toy children played with; and a dual-purpose hot-pot ladle—one half solid for soup, one half perforated to strain. Everyday ingenuity hidden in plain sight.

We visited the local museum and saw a plaque written by Emperor Yongzheng, a cultural treasure. We analyzed every local specialty—especially Pingwu’s free-range rooster, whose meat was outstanding.

At Li Xinrui’s home we found every family had a small kang—a heated brick bed. People ate, chatted, and socialized on it. It cost only about 3,000 RMB to build. We thought: could such a kang become a livestream studio? So we made one—a rural livestream room where education, honey bottling, and homemade lip-balm production could all be broadcast transparently.

Many NGOs erect monuments to mark their projects. We wondered: instead of spending money on a stone tablet, why not crowd-fund a transparent “memorial” that keeps functioning—a live studio that continues helping villagers sell their products?

When I was an undergraduate, every teacher said, “Design should serve the people.” After years of practice, I learned that truly serving society is complex. It’s not something a designer can invent alone at a computer. It requires long-term immersion in social contexts—understanding how the real world operates, how organizations and individuals relate, how meaning is produced.

If you don’t understand how society works, you can’t design for it. The deeper I went, the more painful it became—but also the more exciting.

Because social design forces me to re-examine reality; it widens the narrow world I used to inhabit and reminds me that I am just one small particle in a vast system. Yet I haven’t lost faith. I still believe design can change society—even if only a little.

Time is short today, so I can’t share every story. But if you are interested in social design, you can follow my public account “Zishu Teacher’s Social Design”—to use design to bring change, to give someone else new hope.

Thank you.