Crafting New Identities

Design has long been recognized as an instrument of social transformation, yet its application in post-stigma urban communities, where identity reconstruction is as urgent as economic recovery, remains underexplored. This article examines a participatory batik design program conducted with twenty residents of RW 12, Putat Jaya Urban Village, the former Kampung Dolly red-light district in Surabaya, Indonesia, over fifteen months (October 2024–December 2025). Using Participatory Action Research (PAR) and thematic analysis, the study traces how a five-stage co-creation workshop, spanning memory excavation, visual translation, tool fabrication, batik production, and social validation, cumulatively built five dimensions of community agency. The process yielded seven original batik motifs functioning as social artifacts of identity transformation, alongside an innovation in which canting caps (a hand-crafted copper stamp used in batik production) were fabricated from waste from a billiard-table workshop, thereby dismantling historical gender barriers in batik cap production. Three original concepts are introduced: collective symbolic amnesia, symbolic reappropriation, and material reappropriation. Findings are synthesized into the Participatory Craft Design Framework for Post-Stigma Community Identity Transformation: a three-layer model applicable to other postcrisis urban communities. This study demonstrates that participatory craft design is not merely a production activity but a mechanism for returning narrative rights to communities defined by others.