A toolbox for introducing co-design processes in rural areas with social innovation hosting initiatives.

With the COVID-19 crisis, but the phenomenon had already started before, increasingly more city residents have considered leaving cities and moving or even moving back to rural areas. This has been the case, especially, of young members of the creative class that have felt its crisis in increasingly gentrified cities with less work opportunities, and more dissatisfaction with mainstream design, economy, and society. At the same time, many rural areas have been in a state of crisis for several decades, between reduction of economic opportunities, emigration, lack of services and infrastructures and deterioration of existing ones, increasing urbanization. For these reasons, many rural areas have been increasingly felt as left-behind places and accordingly have protested politically. Two different worlds, each in crisis in different ways, have found a meeting point in an increasing phenomenon of social innovation hosting initiatives that we call Village Hosts: these are cases of emerging distributed grassroots design for social innovation initiatives experimenting new economic and social models while connecting these places with larger-scale networks. These are informal and grassroots design and creative practices that are slowly emerging: the objective of this paper is to investigate how design could improve the meeting of these two worlds in crisis towards experimenting alternative futures. How could Village Hosts co-design initiatives with local rural communities? We thus present and document a co-design toolbox based on extending an open source existing one already adopted with grassroots communities regarding policy making, now further developed and recontextualized. In this paper we document the toolbox, its development process, the literature and previous practice behind it, reflecting on its contributions to design practice, literacies and research.