Collaborative services (Jegou, Manzini 2008), implicated in the creative communities have been regarded as a new tool to promote the sustainable lifestyles. While the Open Source, P2P, Free Software for collaborative productions in digital world bring out new possible opportunities to an everyday lifestyle guided towards sustainability. The paper reports a joint workshop, Chita 08 between School of Design, Jiangnan University (JU) and Indaco department, Politecnico di Milano (Polimi) in 2008 on the subject of collaborative service and mobile communication, organized as a parallel course of LSF 07 in Polimi. The research project informed by the paper is to investigate the service design approach to promote the collaborative service particularly in the context of China and how mobile communication enables it. The discussions and conclusions have been done taking into account the service design approach and the inter-culture experience.
Everything changes and the only certain thing that we know about the future is that the current change must change direction, it must find the way to sustainability. In this process, China has the concrete possibility to surprise us, more than it did in recent times, and to leapfrog (Manzini 2006). Facing the pressing problems (in environmental, also social perspectives) and visions of society (harmonious society), it’s a good moment to promote the design research and action agenda for sustainability in China. Sustainable everyday life (also called sustainable lifestyle) is one of keys to open the windows of a sustainable and harmonious society.