DESIGN FOR AGEING ANG HAPPINESS By HKDILWLDESIS Lab, Social Design Research Group, Hong Kong Design Institute
1. Design for Ageing and Happiness:
Design.Lives Lab in TKO to
investigate ‘Design Thinging’ and
design intelligence
HKDILWLDESIS Lab, Social Design Research Group,
Hong Kong Design Institute
Place: Tseung Kwan O, Hong Kong, China
Keywords: Social Design, Festival, Everyday Practice
2. Context:
AGEING & HAPPINESS IN TKO
While Hong Kong has been named the most
liveable city by the Economist magazine, its
newest town, Tseung Kwan O (TKO) is named
as ‘a city without streets’. TKO might not be big
enough to be a city but it is home to over
400,000 people. It appears to have everything
for living but has been critiqued ‘as planned but
not designed’ meaning that all the essentials of
a good urban environment are provided but they
are usually poorly implemented and
thoughtlessly executed.
This poorly designed area is the neighbourhood
where our school, HKDI’s new campus was
located from 2010. The focus of this 2nd
Design.Lives Lab at HKDI was to find out who
are those living in TKO, how are their lives and
how is their happiness affected by the poorly
designed physical environment? What have
they done to make it better?
3. Project Response:
DESIGN TRICYCLES TO
CELEBRATE CHINESE NEW
YEAR 2013
Ehn (2008) and Binder et al (2012)
stress that participatory design
projects always involve making a
central design medium or material
(in the form of theatre, performance
or workshop) here they mean that
design is not a single artefact, but a
project. This is what they called,
Design Thinging.This theoretical
background informed our project
brief for 25 HighDip Students to
design and perform a design
activity WITH our ageing population
in the TKO area, neighbourhood for
our design school.
4. Actor 1: Community Design Learning for students
Because this project was set up as an extracurricular project, i.e.
no credits for study and was not counted as coursework, we made
four briefing sessions to different classes in order to recruit more
students. At the end, we achieved over 20 1st year students from
the Product & Interior Design (PID) Department.
Mentors:
Dr Yanki Lee, Adjunct Professor, HKDI
Paula Dib, Visiting Fellow, HKDI
5. Actor 2 : TKO residents
Responses to the poorly designed spaces, residents respond
resourcefully and we sent our students to go out into the
community to engage local residents of the TKO areas, especially
the elderly, about happy moments in their daily life
6. Actor 2 : TKO residents
! as well as their creative responses to
communal spaces
11. Tool and Method:
Prototyping was introduced to the learners who are fresh to design. It
was about making and testing the design objects but also about
testing ideas with others. The idea of infrastructuring that arises from
the distinction between the phases of design-before-use and design-
in-use.
12. Role of Design(ers)
How do designers become social? This
was the question for us as design
researchers. Once designers proclaim
that they are ‘turning social’, aiming at
bringing forth social change, what
designers should do? What is the
meaning of ‘social’ to designers? Where
is the ‘social’? To those practicing
Participatory Design, designers have
found a fundamental obligation to design
events or Manzini and Rizzo (2011)
constructed a new typology of the role of
designers as triggers, codesign members
and design activists.
13. Project output and impact:
A three-week design lab for students aims to define public through
design and it is part of the setting up of DESIS Lab at HKDI, a
vocational training school. It contributed to the development of social
design research in Hong Kong and link to international network.
14. Learning outcomes:
•! For the students: new
experiences to design for/with
communities
•! For the tutors: demonstration of
new teaching way to bring
interdisciplinary teams together
•! For the local communities:
triggering new ideas of design
education
•! For the school HKDI: launch
project for DESIS Lab and
generated awareness
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