Individual Project / Service Design & Urban Strategy
2025
Individual Project / Service Design & Urban Strategy
2025
Overview
Situated within Wenzhou’s “Five Waters Co-Governance” initiative, River Symbiosis bridges the gap between ecological achievements and everyday public experience. The project reimagines each river as a sentient digital life form with emotional states. Through AR gamification and a companion app, water-quality data becomes expressive feedback, guiding residents from awareness to low-effort action and long-term co-care.
Problem
Wenzhou’s rivers have become cleaner and more orderly, yet many residents feel they have grown more distant from daily life—often fenced, hard-edged, and “view-only.”
Key problems identified:
Low public participation: governance is technology- and engineering-led, with limited resident involvement.
Weakened emotional connection: rivers look open but feel hard to approach or truly experience.
Functional simplification: rivers are treated mainly as “objects of management,” not lived public spaces.
Cultural disconnection: memories of river life exist, but shared daily practices are fading.
Core Insight
Cleaner rivers don’t automatically rebuild closeness. What’s missing is a low-threshold, continuous bridge between governance/data and human perception, memory, and daily experience.
Solution Concept
River Symbiosis reimagines each urban river as a digital life form—a river spirit with identity, memory, and mood. Real-time water data drives its emotional expression, allowing the river to “speak” through light, behavior, and evolving states. By turning indicators into feelings, the project invites care that is intuitive, repeatable, and shared.
System Structure
AR on-site experience + App for continuity
AR (Riverfront): meet river spirits, see the river’s mood, unlock stories and past images, complete light actions (cleaning/planting).
App (Daily use): monitor river status, receive tasks and alerts, sign up for activities, track contribution history, and join community discussions.
Together, AR creates emotional entry and presence; the app sustains long-term participation and co-governance.
Participation Path
Discover → Care → Co-create
Discover (low-threshold entry) Encounter a river spirit, reveal memories, understand what the river is experiencing.
Care (repeatable everyday engagement) Check real-time conditions, do small tasks, build attachment through feedback.
Co-create (shared action and impact) Join cleanups/planting, upload observations, contribute stories—turning care into a collective practice.
Mechanisms
Core mechanisms:
River Identity: each river has an avatar + ID + evolving “life history.”
Data-triggered tasks: when indicators drop, tasks are generated and pushed via the app.
Vitality points: actions earn points, levels, and visible participation footprints.
Impact unlocks: accumulated points support real-world ecological improvements and public-space upgrades.
