Hong Kong faces unique challenges in public housing design due to its high population density, with over one-third of residents living in public housing developments. The Housing Bureau and the Hong Kong Housing Authority have continuously enhanced public housing quality. Beyond the goals of “Enhancing Quantity, Speed, and Efficiency” to promote increased public housing supply, they have evolved toward a more comprehensive vision of “Enhancing Quality,” improving residents’ well-being by focusing on their psychological, social, and environmental needs. The Well-Being Design Guide represents a new approach, transforming public housing from basic shelters into environments that actively nurture holistic well-being.

“Well• Being” is led by the Housing Bureau and the Housing Authority of the HKSAR Government, with the Neighbourhood Innovation Lab bringing together a group of experts including design thinking and innovation consultants, architects, landscape designers, visual designers, urban planners, real estate scholars, engineering and management experts, nursing professionals, and social workers. They employ “design thinking” and “participatory design” approaches to systematically research and integrate human-centred well-being design guidelines, aiming to create public housing that is simple yet comfortably livable, making residents feel at ease and well-being.

We employed multiple complementary methods, visiting seventeen districts across Hong Kong, conducting extensive professional discussions, research analyses, literature reviews, resident interviews, and community surveys, collecting input from 3,000 public housing residents and 630 professionals. Combining qualitative research, literature reviews, and case studies, they transformed academic findings into practical design solutions that effectively address community needs.

This initiative challenges conventional architectural practice in three fundamental ways: replacing top-down planning with collaborative co-creation that recognises residents as experts in lived experiences; expanding planning beyond physical structures to include community activities, addressing both “hardware” and “software” needs; and shifting evaluation from quantitative measures to qualitative outcomes like well-being. The “Wellbeing for HA” design guidelines serve as references for new public housing and renovations of existing estates and aim to promote innovative developments in planning, design, and implementation across all housing types in Hong Kong.

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POSsible! Public Open Space Design Lab is a cross-sectoral design empowerment initiative, enquiring into the innovation opportunities for reinventing Public Open Space (POS) in Hong Kong through design thinking. This initiative aspires to design the future public space for high-density cities, conceiving a blueprint for sustainable development and improving liveability through series of workshops. Public open spaces are an integral part of our daily lives and relate to everyone in the community. This project encourages the adoption of design thinking in the design development process, especially through engagement with various stakeholders, which is a key to designing innovative and diversified public spaces.

This project explores 6 different typologies of public spaces under the Architectural Services Department, including country parks, sitting-out areas, plazas, waterfront promenades, public play space and public parks. Two series of workshops have been conducted for social listening. The first round of thematic workshops looked into existing pain-points with each public space typology, and brainstormed future opportunities of an ideal public space, exploring realms of design, usage, operations and management. To synthesise and localise theory, experience, observation, and engagement, The UNHabitat Dimensions for Quality Public Space Assessment were used to form the Good Design-led Framework for POS based on the context of Hong Kong.

In August-September 2022, POSsible! Weeks were launched which include POSsible! Design Thinking Workshop Series 2 in which professionals and design practitioners were invited to delve into the practical issues on POS policies and design, as well as to review the design guide and the POSsible! Design Thinking Toolkit. Each workshop was kick-started with speakers from Hong Kong and overseas presenting case studies that would be discussed in the workshop.

POSsible! Symposium – POS Design invited local and international speakers to share cases with a view to bringing in multidisciplinary insights for POS innovation in Hong Kong. The symposium consisted of four thematic dialogues with global cases that demonstrate the use of design thinking for applying design thinking and innovative POS design, and a separate experiment sharing session of POSsible! Design Guide and Design Thinking Toolkit for government bodies and  professionals to co-create better strategies for POS design in Hong Kong.

The POSsible! Design Thinking Toolkit is developed for POS practitioners, including government officials, designers, NGO operators and researchers. It is an interactive toolkit for applying design thinking on POS projects that can be flexibly adapted to expand the team’s capability to better understand the dynamics in POS projects between the following parties: users, stakeholders and team. It helps the team align with the Good Design-Led Values, and create a tactical tool to implement the design thinking approach step-by-step even with different project constraints. The tools are resources that help cultivate a new mode of thinking within the team, starting with bite-size actions towards flexibly adapting them for implementation. As the team becomes more familiar with the tools after practising on real cases, they will cultivate a culture towards design thinking and innovation as a habit and a mode of practice.

To better synthesise data, we have developed a data platform to document insights from online and on-site surveys, aiming to understand how people utilise public open spaces. Data collection started in November 2021 and is ongoing to collect more data points. We have reached over 100 people to understand how they use public open spaces, their aspirations and how we can create better public open spaces. Through this open data platform, you may find interesting insights that would help you to understand more about Public Open Spaces in Hong Kong.

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