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

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?

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.

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

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

Actor 2 : TKO residents ! as well as their creative responses to communal spaces

DESIGN THINGING TOGETHER 1.! Understanding Happiness 2.! Sharing happy moments 3.! Collectively mapping session 4.! ‘What if’ brainstorming session

DESIGN THINGING TOGETHER 5. Five-day Collective Making period

DESIGN THINGING TOGETHER 6. One day Community parade for co-creation design

DESIGN THINGING TOGETHER 7. Three-day exhibition sharing process with communities

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.

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.

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.

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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THEMATIC CLUSTER

Ageing & Happiness:Am I too old to play?

Ageing inTseung Kwan O, Hong Kong

Contact person:DR YANKI C LEEYANKILEE@HOTMAIL.COM