Island tourism faces challenges due to evolving issues and limited participation from diverse and marginalised groups, undermining efforts towards sustainability. To address these challenges, this study advances a co-design approach that foregrounds the role of infrastructure as an enabling foundation for ongoing participation and collaborative innovation. It draws on a six-month co-design project on Mayu Island in Southeast China, a community in transition from fishing to tourism. Instead of directly proposing solutions or development ideas, the design teams engaged government officials, business owners, residents, and tourists through a set of socio-material arrangements, including mapping, an interactive exhibition, and co-design workshops. This process yielded two collaboratively developed solutions: a new cleaning schedule to address beach litter and the repurposing of an underutilised parking lot to support vendors. Building on these outcomes, a co-design infrastructure is proposed, comprising three interconnected components: mapping (surfacing complex relationships), narrating (embedding lived narratives), and deriving (enabling exploration of new possibilities). The findings demonstrate how the co-design infrastructure process brings diverse voices to the surface, fosters collective meaning-making, and supports adaptive problem-solving. Furthermore, the features of islandness specific to Mayu Island are analysed to highlight how they shape co-design strategies and outcomes, reinforcing the importance of context-sensitive approaches in island settings. Ultimately, the study demonstrates how co-design infrastructure processes can support more grounded and enduring forms of island tourism development.
Wu et al. (2025) studied this question.