Today, the Chinese nation is entering a new stage of historical development, and the strategy of rural revitalization and the rejuvenation of rural culture have become an important part of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. The countryside is the place with the deepest historical and cultural accumulation in China, and thousands of years of farming civilization have shaped the background of China's local culture, leaving a rich local cultural heritage and its unique cultural and artistic forms, containing infinite wisdom of innovation and creation, and is the source of wisdom for us to establish national cultural self-confidence and shape the image of Chinese culture in the new era. In recent years, with the help of the power of design, the practice of "local design" or "local design" that promotes the creation of local culture has shown a vigorous development trend in China, and has become a new cultural landscape for transforming society.
A government-led and all-out "socialization" practice movement
How to revitalize the local cultural heritage resources, activate the vitality of the countryside, enrich the rural cultural life through design, and the local tradition that is gradually declining in the process of modernization, through the rational redesign process, return its value to the reality of production and life, and achieve a new atmosphere of rural civilization with a new form, function and significance, has become the general consensus of the design community to explore the road of art and rural construction with Chinese characteristics. At the same time, in the process of adhering to its own unique social and cultural background and development logic, a new "local design" practice paradigm of urban and rural integration and same frequency resonance has gradually formed.
China's practice of "local design" is a diversified and integrated mode of action guided by the national ideology of breaking the imbalance between urban and rural areas and achieving common prosperity, mainly guided and supported by the government, and widely participated by the whole society. In order to solve the problems that have affected China's sustainable development for a long time and promote the coordinated development and orderly interaction between urban and rural areas, the state has launched major decisions and deployments of "new rural construction" and "implementation of rural revitalization strategy". Rural development urgently needs to be transformed, and rural transformation urgently needs the intervention of design. Relying on the national development strategy, combined with the social development trends of science and technology, economy, consumption, cultural and creative industries, and gathering the resources of the government, enterprises, universities, scientific research institutions, social welfare organizations and other parties, the "local design" action to help rural revitalization is a large-scale movement with the participation of the whole society, with more diversified forms of expression and more dimensional value concepts. Inheriting and utilizing excellent traditional culture, enhancing national cultural self-confidence, achieving common prosperity, and building a harmonious society for mankind are the future sustainable development goals of its higher level of value pursuit.
A new concept of "local design" based on equality and reciprocity
In the history of the formation of the chinese nation's pluralistic and integrated cultural structure, it has bred traditional Chinese design values with social values as the core, "people-oriented", "ecological", "harmonious", "moderate", "flexible", etc., these design value concepts with a long tradition are still contained in the traditional creation activities of local society, with the essential attributes of endless adaptation to nature and society, which is worth our in-depth observation and practice, and integrate them into modern design methods and aesthetic consciousness for re-creation. Make it better serve modern life. Therefore, for designers, the primary task is to break the fascination with the new wave design consciousness and the confidence of urban design experience, abandon the overly self-centered personalized expression, objectively examine the reality of rural society with a more equal value and development vision, deeply explore the value of local design, create conditions for differentiated culture, and truly discover the social design integration point that connects the countryside and the future community, rather than just treating the countryside as an experimental field, and directly "substituting" some designs that are difficult to digest in the city "Forced" into the countryside, resulting in a waste of resources.
At present, many conditions for urban and rural design are further flattening. With the changes in the social environment, the increase in urban work pressure and the increase in the cost of living, many people have begun to choose to find opportunities in the countryside to expand new areas of development; at the same time, the consumption-centered situation of modern design has also changed, and design is developing from professionalism and branding to popularization and personalization, and more attention is paid to humanistic emotions and personalized experiences. Therefore, villages that retain more characteristic cultural resources and natural resources are more competitive and advantageous. Coupled with the extensive road network of transportation, the Internet covering remote rural corners, and the continuous enrichment of travel experience, the time and space distance between cities and villages has been further compressed. This not only greatly improves the accessibility and convenience of remote areas, but also greatly improves the visibility of rural areas, but also further enhances the exchange of materials and labor mobility between urban and rural areas. Even if the rural landscape has not moved or changed, but the cultural landscape has undergone great changes, some innovative development of the countryside is more livable than the city, a large number of urban middle class and "Z generation" young people (mainly artists, designers and freelancers) began to return to the countryside, and consciously choose some local villages for "cohabitation experiments", or local entrepreneurship, or resident design, urban-rural integration showed a new look. The formation of new rural communities will naturally produce new localities, traditional rural life is consciously or unconsciously designed and transformed, and new residents have gained a new sense of hometown and belonging beyond the place. Once the new villagers' relations of integration and symbiosis and mutual benefit are formed, the rural customs and rural appearances are reshaped, which will surely bring richer contemporary cultural life and more work opportunities to the countryside. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this kind of decentralized, decentralized small community living experiment, which can both resolve the crisis and disperse the population, has become more and more popular. This is a new self-consciousness and a new ideological dimension with self-realization value of China's "vernacular design".
New trends, paths and approaches to multi-dimensional focus
Cultural revitalization is the soul of the mainland's rural revitalization strategy, and rural revitalization is inseparable from the nourishment of rural culture. The locality is the root of traditional culture, and the locality represents the difference of culture, which is the starting point for human beings to pursue diversity. Therefore, taking "locality" as the basis, starting from reality, to explore the unique local culture, and conform to the trend of the times, from the three aspects of rural leisure, rural tourism and farming culture to carry out cultural and creative design, is also a major practice method for The Chinese design community to enrich and prosper the local culture under the guidance of the national development strategy. Its purpose is to re-express contemporary based on local heritage such as materials, colors, shapes, and functions through design research, and to skillfully integrate them with cultural, scientific, technological, visual, psychological and other elements to ultimately serve the villagers with the design results, and then guide and stimulate the endogenous creativity of the villagers and build a better life together. The achievement of this goal depends on three factors: adapting to social needs, enhancing contemporary values, and forming autonomy.
Today's design innovation has long gone beyond the "linear innovation" in the fields of design, materials and processes, and is moving towards the comprehensive road of interdisciplinary research methods and cross-field integrated innovation, and more emphasis is placed on the application value of design and nature, combined with science and technology, to serve social innovation, ecology and sustainable future. The diversity of local cultural characteristics is an extremely valuable resource of the mainland. Through the creative transformation of design creativity to "local heritage", we cannot be separated from the locality, and adhere to the brand building as the core, give the results to the local label, thereby driving the development of related industries, so it is necessary to deal with the cooperative development relationship between different industries and carry out collaborative innovation and development. In addition, it is also necessary to actively explore how to maximize the dissemination of local cultural achievements with the help of new science and technology, new consumption and new commercial means, open up a broader market development space for them, and work together to create a new "local design" sustainable development model of "product-product industry-life".
The countryside is the mother and rich place where traditional Chinese culture is conceived. In particular, rural handicrafts are mostly labor-intensive industries, so that more rural handicrafts can be rejuvenated and produced on the spot, which can not only inherit craftsmanship, but also be green and environmentally friendly. Due to the low barrier to entry, it is very suitable for solving the employment problem of idle labor in rural areas, and can also promote the harmony of family and neighborhood relations. However, due to changes in production and lifestyle, today there are fewer and fewer young people engaged in traditional handicrafts in the countryside, and the vast majority are in a situation where there are fewer successors. Many rural craftsmen have long been deprived of professional training and cultural education. To this end, rural development must also introduce more educational resources, substitute for the common appreciation of economy and culture, give full play to the unique resource advantages and creative endowments of rural culture, help to take the cultural content with production nature and market potential such as rural handicrafts as an ecological, harmonious and happy development paradigm, and give play to the diversified role of cultural inheritance, industrial development and cultural enrichment, so as to provide impetus for the sustainable development of rural revitalization and effectively enhance the sense of gain and happiness of villagers.
At present, there are still great differences between the spiritual and cultural life of urban and rural areas on the mainland, which can give full play to the advantages of the rural revitalization government, improve the allocation of economic, work, cultural life and educational resources, improve the active participation of villagers in the cultivation and practice of "local design" through strengthening policy support and sharing innovative benefits, and stimulate the awareness and vitality of innovation and entrepreneurship of the newly lifted out of poverty population. For the "local design" activities of the government or local enterprises, we should continue to focus on strengthening the landing of the results of industrial revitalization; the "local design" activities for the villagers should be further cultural revitalization, improve the overall literacy of the population, so that the countryside can truly restore cultural self-confidence and aesthetic self-confidence, so as to achieve co-prosperity and symbiosis with the city as soon as possible.
(This paper is a phased result of the sub-project "Research on Design Aesthetics" (19ZD23), a major project of art science of the National Social Science Foundation of China)
(Author Affilications:School of Arts, Soochow University)
Editor: Liu Yan
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