Image 1: Social Media Invitation for The Event
After nine months miles away from home, I finally come back home. But this time, not as a local, but as a visitor. With the eyes of both a stranger and a researcher, the familiar suddenly feels unfamiliar. What once seemed ordinary and normal, now reveals its weight, its fractures, its hidden power. Paradoxically, distance makes me feel closer, more empowered to question and empathize what I once accepted as “normal.”
The people of Cipadu welcomed me with open hands, seeing my presence as a chance to make a ripple. Like many marginalized communities, they often look for a saviour. But I reminded them, I am not here to save, but to spark possibilities, to help them find power within themselves. Making emergent strategy possible by involving learning from the patterns and systems of the natural world to build adaptive and relational ways of being (Brown, 2017).
This makes me wonder about the weight of socio-ecological pressure they were facing until they were so desperate for immediate change.
The Preparation
I spent hours with fellow Indonesian designers, who were interested to collaborate in my third intervention, shaping a simple way to turn people’s imagination into usable social data. While we were still wrestling with a co-design method, I received a reply from Lucy Kimbell, Professor of Contemporary Design Practices at Central Saint Martins, to my earlier email on Social Design.
She shared a bunch of resources on design for transitions, including ‘Thinking while drawing and drawing to think: Exploring reflective doodling as a critical reflective practice in design for transitions.’ (Wallace, 2020) which sparks a new idea for the co-design method.
Image 2: Intervention 3 Plan
In this journal, the writer discusses how reflective doodling can be a unique form of thinking-drawing helps designers process complex theoretical knowledge to unpack wicked and sociotechnical problems. Drawing or doodling can be the easiest medium for co-creation between diffuse designer (the people) and expert designers, that could lead to emerging innovation (Manzini, 2015). Thus, it made me and my fellow designers come up with the idea of cross-collaboration co-design hackathon, through reflective drawing.
“Draw, Play, Reflect” Implementation
Image 3: Reflective Drawing Implementation
In this intervention, researchers and designers stepped into the role of story facilitators instead of heroes. By engaging with residents’ lived experiences, we gathered fragments of their aspirations and transformed them into visual narratives on postcards. Inspired by the idea of penpals, each postcard became a vessel for heartfelt expression, allowing people to pour their emotions into drawings.
The session was designed to move away from the typical top-down “magic touch” solutions of local authorities, but rather amplifying community voices through creative translation and uncovering their potential. The task was simple: imagining your vision of a dream home, public space, or community in Kampung or Village of Cipadu. Residents could either sketch freely on a blank A6 postcard or overlay their reflections onto curated photographs that illustrated pressing issues from the first intervention; flooding, waste, public space, and the state of gotong royong. .
Participants ranged from children to older generations, with sessions held across two days. The first day was dedicated to adults, who tended to be more reflective, grounding their drawings in both discovery and personal memory. Many linked their ideas to lived experiences from the past, enabling us to uncover deeper insights into the root causes of the challenges faced by the community.
The second day was dedicated to children, the very generation that many participants in the previous intervention had expressed concern about. For the children, the session felt more like a drawing and play activity rather than a co-design process, which was completely fine, since the aim was to capture their perspectives on the neighbourhood rather than formal aspirations. Children naturally tended to draw familiar and simple things, such as mountains, houses, or objects from their daily surroundings.
As anticipated, the drawing-on-postcard activity was seamless and easy to engage with. With encouragement and affirmation throughout the drawing process, participants became more confident in their art, and many ended up creating more than one postcard to reflect on the multiple challenges they face in their neighbourhood. It was heartwarming to witness participants sharing their reflections not only with their neighbours, but also with the local authorities who joined the session.
Participants also seemed more motivated once they learned that their drawings would be exhibited in London as part of further research. To make the process more enjoyable, snacks and drawing tools were provided so that participants could focus entirely on expressing their ideas. Interestingly, some children even brought their own drawing tools, making them more comfortable with the activity.
The Unexpected Outcome
Image 4: The Reflective Drawing Postcards Compilation
In total, more than 90 postcards were collected from both children and adults. About 70 participants preferred to draw on blank postcards, allowing themselves greater freedom to express radical and imaginative ideas. Meanwhile, around 20 chose to draw on photographic overlays, giving them a more direct way to respond to specific issues.
Image 5: A Girl Draw Her Dream to Live Far Away from Flood
As expected, flooding emerged as the community’s main concern. However, the personal stories and underlying causes revealed through the drawings were deeply unexpected, uncovering new dimensions of the problems, such as:
- “I need to move my motorcycle to higher ground whenever heavy rain comes. I’m so afraid the flood will sink it,” one young lady explained.
- “Since Covid-19, my house has sunk further with every flood. It’s so hard for me to get out,” said an old lady who lives nearby.
- “What can I do? I can’t move. No one will buy my house like this. My family and I just have to live with it.”
- “I wish I could move the entire neighbourhood to the mountains, so we’d be safe from floods.” A kid said cheerfully.
- “Some of my friends have quitted gambling. I am both sad to lose the fun with them, but I am happy that they are doing better than we were. Stop gambling!”
- “How I wish I had a mansion, maybe I would never experience anymore” a little girl said.
- and so on!
Image 6: Aftermath Waste
These reflections pierced my heart. Instead of hope, many participants expressed resignation—having endured these struggles for so long, they have tried simply to cope. This resignation has, in turn, led some to neglect their environment, as simple as not carrying their rubbish after the session even though we provide it with a nearby bin, and having some people to clean up for the event. Albeit, most of their drawings clearly showed a longing for a greener, better neighbourhood. They still have dreams and ideas for an improved future, but the surrounding systems do not support those visions.
On the other hand, is the resignation is purely because of the people fault? Or is this the systemic issue that normalise the digression behaviour that occurs for a long time?
The Paradox of The Wicked Problems
Image 7: Previous Interventions Addressed Issues
When we first did the intervention online, we thought the environment and social issues are the main problems, but on the second to the third it reveals more complex problems that intertwined.
Image 8: A Remaining Water Tank with a Sign Written “My City Program: No Slum City” On Top of Piles of Bins
To some extent, their socio-ecological challenges are deeply intertwined with sociotechnical issues, particularly economic education barriers. In terms of economic issue, for example, on the first day of the workshop, my partner noticed a water tank engraved with the slogan “No Slum City”, standing in sharp irony amid a neighbourhood marked by slum conditions and unpleasant odours. When I asked local authorities about it, one explained that the state government had indeed launched a slum-upgrading program a couple years ago, allocating £44,600 for improvements in the urban village. “However,” she admitted, “the person in charge took the majority of the funds, leaving us with nothing but the water tank for a clean water station.”
This statement shook me. That amount of funding could have significantly improved the entire village, yet it was robbed away. It was no wonder that residents felt hopeless, not only battling flooding but also local thuggery (premanisme), a predatory saviourism that eroded trust and robbed them of change.
Image 9: A Young Boy Imagining A Corrupt-free City in 10 Years
Another proof of subtle local thuggery or premanisme or vrijman-ism is shown from the some local authorities in Cipadu who requested us, the researchers, to at least give the second session participants some kind of. “door prizes” or “souvenirs” in order for people to be more encouraged to come. I realized there was my fault involved in this communication, because I might not clearly addressed the invitation as a research process, therefore, many of them saw this as a drawing contest which they have known will have a reward in it.
The rewarding system in the whole process should be further study among the people. Do pressing situations or economic challenges play a role in people’s eagerness to participate? Or is it the power dynamics at play, where the involvement of local authorities creates intentional interests that shape how this research is received?
I believe that inaccessible education also plays a role in shaping the neighbourhood. Some residents endure and normalise digressive behaviours, partly due to the lack of access to education. Beyond the absence of higher education institutions, there is also a shortage of both formal and informal early childhood education.
“We often have tactical workshops whenever development program funding is allocated from the top down,” the local authority representative explained, “but they are never sustainable.”
Educational programs in the village are often created to serve government interests—such as digital marketing or barista training courses—rather than addressing the actual needs of Cipadu residents. This reveals how even education becomes corrupted, stripped of its role in giving people agency to contextualize and address the real problems in their own neighborhood.
Image 10: A Gentleman Design A Water Flow Solution to Stop Flooding
With education, empowered people can empower others, if their ideas are genuinely heard and captured. Education also liberates individuals from habits that perpetuate inequity (Anaissie, Cary, Clifford, Malarkey, & Wise, 2021). In the residents’ drawings, 13% portrayed emergent ideas on how to improve their village, most prominently around flood, waste and social solutions.
Image 11: A Gentleman Shared His Community Experience in Gambling
This is a clear signal: those with lived experience, keen observation, and contextual knowledge already carry the capacity to reimagine and redesign their neighbourhood. These are the people who understand their community best—and they deserve to be better facilitated.
Image 12: Session 2 Intervention with Children
With education, we are also seeding the younger generation to become the agent of change, by simply liberating themselves with curiosity and capability in observing their surrounding.
Image 13: Youth Inspired Youth Shown in The Artwork They Made
Conclusion: Untied The Tangled Ties
Going home is indeed both good and bad idea.
Bad because 19 hours of flight back and forth, and 10 days or relay race of doing the research is very TIRING and COMPACT. Blame on the peak season during July and August.
Had to do the research for 2 days in Cipadu, Tangerang, Banten, and doing observation on successful creative urban villages in Gempolsari, Bandung, West Java with Karasa BDG collective (which I will report it too on the next post.)
Good because now the research led us into something, unlocking many, many confusion that I could not be able to understand when I just did them online.
Image 14: A Young Man Shared His Thought on How To Stop Waste in The Sewers
Ultimately, this co-design hackathon in a form of reflective drawing reveals the wicked nature of the problems in Cipadu: flooding is not just an environmental issue, but a symptom of intertwined socio-technical failures.
This intervention highlights both the power and the paradox of community-led imagination in contexts of systemic neglect. On the surface, reflective drawing appeared to provide a liberating platform, because residents of Cipadu can finally voiced their frustrations, hopes, and visions through postcards that bridged generational perspectives.
Yet, beneath this creativity lies a sobering reality: their aspirations are repeatedly undermined by structural inequities, corrupted governance, and fragile socio-ecological systems.
The findings reveal that what often appears as “resignation” or “ignorance” among residents is not simply a matter of apathy or individual fault, but rather the internalization of systemic failure. It is proven from poor governance and inaccessible education, that makes the community’s voices rarely translate into tangible change.
Therefore, the systemic socio-ecological issue that has been addressed on the first and the second intervention is expanded beyond what lies on the surface and on the surface. There are bigger problems which can be drawn into multi layer perspective (MLP) from regime tier – economic to education challenges – to landscape tier – political interest. MLP is used to understand which part of the system action is taking place in the overall system of the neighbourhood.
Image 15: People are Engaged in Sharing Their Aspiration
The tension between participation and expectation also surfaces sharply. The request for door prizes or rewards reflects not only miscommunication, but also a deeper conditioning in which external interventions are transactional rather than transformational. Not to mention on how they want this research created immediate change in the near future.
Education emerges as both a missing infrastructure and a latent opportunity. When educational initiatives are designed around government or market agendas, they fail to cultivate agency or contextual problem-solving. But when people are given space to think, draw, and reflect, even in small ways, the seeds of localized solutions begin to surface.
This exposes a critical dilemma in participatory research: can communities genuinely engage in co-design when historical encounters with “development” have often reduced them to passive recipients of aid, rather than active agents of change?
Can people actually inspire people if we elevate Gotong Royong as the design for transtion?
All in all, this collection of reflective drawings serves as a valuable asset or lumbung (inspired by Documenta Fifteen) and a source of inspiration for the further development of Cipadu village. It also serves as a stepping stone in mapping out the priority issues when the government or residents plan to create a program in their village.
Bibliography
Anaissie, T., Cary, V., Clifford, D., Malarkey, T. & Wise, S. (2021). Liberatory Design. http://www.liberatorydesign.com
Wallace, N. (2020) “Thinking while drawing and drawing to think: Exploring ‘reflective doodling’ as a critical reflective practice in design for transitions.,” in. DRS2020: Synergy. Available at: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.187.
Brown, A.M. (2017) Emergent strategy: shaping change, changing worlds. Chico: AK Press.
Manzini, E. (2015) Design, when everybody designs: an introduction to design for social innovation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press (Design thinking, design theory).