Supporting Sustainable Island Tourism Through Infrastructuring Co-Design: A Case Study From Mayu Island

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.