Design has entered mainstream conversation in HK and everyone from the city's chief executive to business tycoons to small children are eager to participate in the new scheme of things, writes Chitralekha Basu.

If March is Hong Kong's art month, December this year was dedicated to design. The just-concluded Business of Design Week - Hong Kong Design Centre's annual flagship event to bring some of the world's leading design stalwarts, brand leaders, industry insiders and users under one roof - saw a footfall of 120,000.

Standing at the threshold of what looked like a design revolution, Hong Kong was eager to check out the gifts it would bring in its wake. Parents brought small children along, lifting them to catch the eye of Pepper the robot who could tell their age by running a face scan. Slightly older people took turns to try on the "Smog Free Ring". Encased inside it was the dust collected from 1,000 cubic meters of polluted city air - a memento from Studio Roosegaarde of Netherlands' efforts to cleanse the skies of Beijing and Tianjin. The project won Design for Asia's (DFA) Grand Award for Sustainability this year.

Across the hallway, a sea of heads sat patiently, drinking up every word as ace architects Rocco Yim and Jacques Herzog shared their thoughts about designing three of Hong Kong's eagerly-anticipated cultural magnets - Palace Museum, M+ museum and Tai Kwun (formerly Central Police Station). Both Yim and Herzog had designed their talks with an elegance matching their architectural accomplishments. Yim talked about drawing inspiration from the exquisite symmetry and unique tones and textures characteristic of Chinese art heritage in designing the Palace Museum, built to showcase select exhibits from Beijing's Forbidden City. Herzog pointed out the allure of revealing rather than covering up the material used to reinforce an existing structure - vesting images of exposed lintels, trusses and the frieze left naked in Tai Kwun with empathy and high value.

At the same time, at Hong Kong Design Institute (HKDI) in Tseung Kwan O, Red Dot Design Award from Essen, Germany presented an exhibition of over 150 gadgets designed, apparently, to allow people a smooth, technology-enabled journey through life - or what the institution's founder Peter Zec calls "bio-artificial reality".

The Homo Ex Data show exhibits included the likes of an incubator that reads the data on premature babies, transferring these, continuously, for medical inspection. Also on display was an optical 3-D scanner with a Space-Age look. This could be used by engineers to get more accurate measurements than the human eye can register. While it might be a while before such products make it to the Hong Kong market, these sleek, sometimes mystifying, models of technological achievement, displayed in the HKDI gallery, exemplified a happy marriage between visual appeal and functionality.

Regaining lost eminence

Design seems to have been liberated from the domain of graphic artists and brand developers, entering mainstream conversation and touching people's lives. The application of design today extends far beyond the company logo on a tube of lip balm. In recent years designers have used innovative thinking to effect paradigm shifts in the areas of environment and sustainability, communication, experience and lifestyle.

A decade ago the idea of packaging and selling an opportunity to catch a few hours of sleep might have sounded like it belonged in an Orwellian dystopia. But the local enterprise Space is Ltd's efforts to let the overworked Hong Kong office-goers catch up on the lost sleep hours has turned out to be a much-lauded, award-winning business model. Space is Ltd took the generic Hong Kong capsule hotel and gave it an environmentally friendly spin to come up with SLEEEP, a tech-driven capsule hotel in Sheung Wan. Co-founder Alex Kot says the project, which won a silver DFA award in the Environmental Design category, maintains a commitment toward reducing carbon footprints by keeping the operations paperless and channeling the heat generated from air-conditioners to warm the showers.

There was a time, 50 to 40 years ago, when Hong Kong was in the forefront of the world's design industry, a prominence supported by the city's prosperous manufacturing base. When these manufacturing enterprises moved to the Chinese mainland, let go of their brand identity and began producing equipment for others, the local product designing industry took a beating.

Now, after decades, Hong Kong seems ready to regain its pre-eminence as a world-class center of design excellence, says Hong Kong Design Council Chairman Eric Yim. "Due to the rising production costs on the mainland, industrialists are looking at Hong Kong again, and one way to regain their competitiveness is to invest in design and branding," says Yim. "The trend is toward original design manufacturing. You provide design to customers who might market your design products under their own brand name and through their channel."

One of the signs that Hong Kong's currency as a design hub is on the rise again, he says, is that a number of designers from Europe have set up bases here, or doing offshore work for clients from this part of the world.

While most of the Hong Kong brands from the 1970s are now extinct, the fine standards of the designers once supported by those brands remain world class. This is manifest in the presence of figures like Alan Chan - who has been in business for 47 years and whose range extends from creating the look of Hong Kong International Airport at Chek Lap Kok to designing for multinational brands like Luis Vuitton to putting together a traditional Chinese tea room experience. For the last of these, he's combined bamboo curtains, fine ceramic ware from Suzhou, Jiangsu province, and craft tea from the Hong Kong boutique cafeteria Teakha - a time-tested experience repackaged for a new audience.

"In recent times a lot of design schools have come up on the mainland but when they look for fine standards, for quality, it's Hong Kong they look at," says Yim. "We are a hub for design talent, both homegrown and imported. That's why the mainland turns to Hong Kong for inspiration, advice and consultancy."

Carrie Lam and 'design thinking'

The buzz around Hong Kong's potential as a design industry leader is backed by political will. Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor advocated the application of "design thinking" in public service and entrepreneurial spaces as a "problem-solving tool" in her maiden Policy Address in October. She also promised HK$1 billion to the CreateSmart Initiative, to give "the community's awareness of creative thinking and design capability" a shot in the arm.

But then, could design thinking actually work in a business environment, say help resolve a labor unrest?

Michael Kadoorie, chairman of CLP Holdings which supplies electricity to most of Kowloon, feels it could, potentially.

"Creative thinking has to, ultimately, translate into something which is going to serve society and create jobs," he says, hinting at the power of creative strategies informed by human empathy to create societal harmony.

"There are so many areas you could apply design thinking," he adds. "For example, your use of electricity today is regulated by your concerns about sustainable use of energy by automatically switching off the electrical devices you don't need at a particular point in time."

Yim remembers how he had applied lessons from his training in architecture to decide on the dynamic of his relationship with his team members when he started Posh, a company supplying customized furniture to offices on the mainland.

"I had no knowledge of business, and knew nothing of the mainland. However, being an architect, I knew a bit of everything from fixing electric wires to plumbing. I used my experience and strategies of bringing professionals from the building industry together to similar effect in the entrepreneurial sphere."

M+, Asia's missing link

While several Hong Kong organizations, particularly nonprofits such as Para Site, are doing their bit toward nurturing a culture of design awareness, perhaps the most visible among these is the M+ museum. Expected to open in 2019, M+ has been using borrowed spaces to present curated shows of items from its 6,000 plus collection. One of these, called Shifting Objectives, was an attempt to give visitors an idea of the scope of design which in the broadest sense of the term extends to every object and experience bearing the imprint of the human mind in action.

The exhibition included historical objects like retro chandeliers from the plastic manufacturer Star Industrial (designed in the 1970s), emojis and a table and chairs 3-D printed from ink sketches of the same by design group Front.

Aric Chen, lead curator of design and architecture at M+, remembers how a bunch of elderly ladies "could barely keep their hands off the 1950s model Toshiba pressure cooker" on show. He was happy that the piece resonated so well with a section of the diverse demographic visiting the show, for the purpose of a museum is to "appeal to a variety of audiences from multiple backgrounds" with the hope that "they will also be open to seeing a few other things around them that they had not thought about".

In a way, the experience helped validate the idea that "design can be just about anything from a beautiful face to a system of production," says Chen, adding, "Our goal is to present this plurality of perspective and ideas about design and its intersection with other disciplines."

He sees M+ as an endeavor toward trying to close a breach in Asia's design ecosystem. "As a museum of visual culture our aim is to develop and explain the stories around the exhibits, tell people what design and architecture are and why they are important. People often don't know of design and architecture as disciplines. This is ironic as they are surrounded by design and architecture every second of their lives."

"We hope we are just the starting point of critically reexamining design narratives. Hopefully all those who come after us, decades afterward, will continue the work," he adds.

Contact the writer at basu@chinadailyhk.com

(HK Edition 12/23/2017 page6)