Tai Po has always been a unique neighbourhood in Hong Kong, with natural assets, cultural heritage, and a combination of urban fabric new and old, together with an abundance of public housing estates. It is a prototype of how nature and city can coexist in harmony. Lam Tsuen River, which runs through the history and identity of Tai Po, is often forgotten. The identity of the river and its quality to the urban fabric of Hong Kong has often been overlooked.

“Neighbourhood Commons @ Tai Po” presents a unique opportunity to rethink a human-centric urban design strategy for a neighbourhood with a focus on the river: its experience, its identity, and how it can enhance the quality of life for residents and visitors alike. In the process of place-making, our objective is to co-create a common vision towards Lam Tsuen River that is informed by a repository of insights and data about the neighbourhood, by the neighbours, for the neighbours.

From mid 2024 to early 2025, together with university students and youths in Tai Po, we began building knowledge about Lam Tsuen River through desktop research, on-site observations and social listening. Informed by desktop research and observation, the exploration is conducted under three themes: urban and nature, sustainability and resilience, and cultural heritage.

Quantitative data is collected through multiple street polling sessions and an online survey designed to understand the current usage and perception towards the river. While numerative data informs us on general themes and patterns, qualitative insights through interviews and focus groups provide an in-depth understanding of their experience and aspirations of the river. 

Co-creating possibilities with youth in Tai Po

With quantitative data and qualitative insights in hand, key challenges and opportunities were identified. They open various brainstorming directions for youth, community stakeholders and experts to ideate creative solutions collectively through workshops and dialogues.

Building on the innovative ideas, we co-created prototypes with youths to visualise different proposals for testing. The prototypes were then further developed into a comprehensive urban design strategy that is informed by community insights, and brought back to the public and experts for validation and prioritisation, formulating a collective urban design vision, objectives, strategies and suggestive roadmap for the next steps.

This project is the very first step of a long-term process of collaboration between multiple parties. Based on a cross-displinary approach, it starts to formulate how to identify issues within the urban environment and neighbourhood from a bottom-up process. Our vision requires the effort of multiple parties, public and private, institutions and citizens, to drive these ideas forward and to create a collective vision.

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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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The Jockey Club Project Wellbeing was one of the first projects where we integrated our user research and stakeholder engagement as an integral part of the placemaking and design strategy. Together with our client team, we are committed from the beginning of the project to create a project that stem from the research process of interacting our student users, and the teachers and principal team.

We started with the research question, how might we create sense of wellbeing for schools?

We conducted workshops with 400+ students and teachers at 8 primary and secondary schools and uncovered several major factors that contributed to well-being. These become the basis to develop our design as we further relate them to school’s context and the spatial limitation.

• Teacher-student connection
• peer-to-peer connection
• sense of belonging
• sense of ownership
• balance of active and private areas
• flexibility for multiple kinds of activities

Our 8 schools for Phase I and Phase II of this project includes:

1. S.K.H. Wei Lun Primary School
2. P.L.K. Ma Kam Ming College
3. P.L.K. Ho Yuk Ching (1984) College
4. TWGHs Ko Ho Ning Memorial Primary School
5. C.C.C. Kei Heep Secondary School
6. C.H.C. Living Spirit College
7. POCA Wong Siu Ching Secondary School
8. Raimondi School

Through three rounds of engagement, we explored the existing usage and the possibilities together with students and teachers on what does wellbeing mean to them. The first workshop is a design thinking incorporated board game for the students and teachers to run through a typical and a future school day journey. Through the gamified process, we aim to understand some of the issues and ideas through the lens of students.

During the second workshop, we mix-and-match different scenarios with different mediums, how would it spark creativity in students and teachers to reimagine a campus that promotes wellbeing?  Through the use of 3D objects, colour pencils and collages, we encouraged students and teachers to get hands-on creating the spatial quality of spaces. 

The final design is a result from further validation where students vote for desired elements of different design options at school. There were many factors that affect the students’ wellbeing, and sometimes these needs are in opposition. For example, active versus passive, group versus individual, fixed versus flexible. From outdoor garden to indoor meditation space, to multi-purpose room. The challenge is to create spaces that can accommodate these multiple options, and remind our team that a key factor of wellbeing for schools also lies in creating flexible functions outside of the day-to-day classroom. For example, putting more emphasis on soft-seating and zones with dimmable lighting, and other elements that can create different sensory regulations for the students based on their initial opinions.

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Data is shaped by our perceptions. More than just cold hard facts, every piece of data is a unique manifestation of an individual, a living breathing human being. They are not static, yet open for interpretation.

100 initial samples are collected to reflect the community’s opinion on the neighbourhood of Central. Shaped by the participants’ experiences, background, language, preferences, they see central, a place of the same data inputs, in many different ways. The art of collecting their opinion intrinsically tries to catalogue this set of open data into different classifications, visualising data into personas.

The installation transforms these insights into a physical representation. Each column features a participant’s personal story and a secret, visualising data using eight materials that symbolise eight personas. The length of the column reflects the participant’s age, while the combination of materials reveals their personality and perspective.

The columns are carefully spaced to allow visitors to weave through them, much like navigating the busy streets of Central. This design mirrors the way we pass strangers in the neighbourhood, often unaware of their personal stories.

Secrets are revealed through specific lenses, offering visitors a glimpse into the hidden layers of Central, encouraging moments of discovery and reflection. It invites audiences to see how the same neighbourhood can hold vastly different meanings depending on the lens through which it is viewed.

Visitors are invited to discover their Central persona through a curated personality test and leave their unique memories about Central. This interaction allows participants to engage with the installation, reflect on their own perceptions, and connect with the diverse voices that shape the narrative of Central.

We attempt to shed a new light on data, to humanise data, to create new interpretations and experiences of data, and have the participant come up with their own lens or shift their lens to look at the same set of data.

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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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At present, there are a lot of improvised uses around Wan Chai. From extension of restaurants with foldable tables and chairs to accommodate more customers, to neighbours blocking car parking with plants. We have started to observe a lot of interesting adaptations that are human-centred and day-to-day, contributing to the neighbourhood commons. The project is based on the simple premise of extending these authentic programming of streets as public spaces. These imply informal adaptations, and eventually, ways of formalising these informal adaptations into actual, inclusive public spaces. These journeys have been adopted in many cities, and the process is usually long and dreary, but it has to start somewhere. This is the start of it for Wan Chai to use topics as such to cultivate civic awareness and ownership.

Between August 2020 and January 2021, we embarked on ‘Neighbourhood Commons @ Wan Chai’, a place-making project aimed at understanding and exploring ways to cultivate an inclusive neighbourhood in Wan Chai. We engaged diverse stakeholders through various forms of public participatory programmes, including 1-on-1 interviews, neighbourhood walks, street polling, co-creation workshops and many more. These activities have allowed us to build a repository of insights and data about the neighbourhood, which have, in turn, informed prototype initiatives developed by the neighbours, for the neighbours.

Researching about Wan Chai with neighbours

Together with 39 civic design fellows, we began to build up knowledge about the Wan Chai neighbourhood. We gathered a body of quantitative data and qualitative insights through a combination of desktop research, observations and social listening. These insights informed in-depth dialogues and an extensive series of workshops with stakeholders that have vested interests in the neighbourhood to ideate ways of approaching a commons.

Building on innovative ideas and the collaborative spirits of civic design fellows and neighbourhood collaborators, we co-created testable prototypes with the public to experiment with ways to create shared value between social and business goals and measure them against defined metrics to review lessons learnt from Wan Chai as a pilot neighbourhood.

Co-creating Weekend ｜from sidewalks, pedestrianised streets, private terraces to public parks

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Disappearing Back Alley – Anywhere Door to the Neighbourhood is an exhibit featured in Hong Kong Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism \ Architecture 2022. The exhibit was showcased at the North Point (East) Passenger Ferry Pier from September to November 2022.

This exhibit presents a virtual neighbourhood experience designed to rekindle public interest in the disappearing back-alley store culture. It allows visitors to immerse themselves in the charm and uniqueness of these hidden urban spaces. It aims to celebrate the cultural significance of back alleys as vibrant hubs of community life, commerce, and history. By blending technology with nostalgia, the exhibit provides an engaging way to explore a fading part of the city’s identity.

Proudly presented with neighbours

The exhibit is proudly curated in collaboration with Mark Lau from Oi Kwan Barber, a beloved back alley store on Spring Garden Street, Wan Chai. Known for its deep roots in the community, Oi Kwan Barber represents the enduring charm of Hong Kong’s back-alley culture. We worked closely with Mark through visits and activations of a neighbourhood living room in the shop. To authentically capture and showcase the essence of these hidden spaces, we documented their barber tools with hand sketches. The exhibits offer visitors an intimate look into the daily life, traditions, and communal value of back-alley stores.

Immerse in the alley

The 1:10 AR model offers a scaled-down representation of the back alley shops by activating the webapp. Whereas the 1:1 full-size AR world takes visitors into an immersive experience of the shop through the “Anywhere Door.” It recreates the sight and atmosphere of these hidden gems, bringing them vividly to life and fostering a deeper appreciation for their cultural value.

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High quality public open spaces can bring physical and mental wellness benefits, improve quality of life for its residents and users, and cultivate an inclusive and harmonious relationships in the diverse neighborhood. In Wan Chai District, each person only enjoys 0.7m2 of open space, which is the lowest among all districts in Hong Kong. A comprehensive research on the usage and conditions of open spaces in Wan Chai and how to improve and better utilise them becomes a striking question to address in the community. Neighbourhood Innovation Lab was commissioned by Wan Chai District Council to conduct open space research in the district on the quality and its correlation to building an inclusive neighbourhood among diverse residents and stakeholders in the community.

From October 2020 to February 2021, we conducted a series of quantitative and qualitative research, macro analysis and micro data collection to develop evidence-based insights and long and short term recommendations to improve open spaces in Wan Chai District to address and enhance inclusivity in the community.

On the largest scale, GIS analysis was conducted to provide an overview of open space distribution in Wan Chai based on existing spatial data and spatial analysis. This is complemented by a survey with 1000 Wan Chai open space users to understand their usage habits and opinions towards open spaces. The survey covers topics including opinions towards existing open spaces, interest in different kinds of future activities and concept testing based on different kinds of inclusivity. These large scale analysis, based on existing spatial data and newly collected survey data, provides a general overview and feeling of open spaces in Wan Chai in the scale of the district.

In addition, 408 1-1 interviews with open space users, and 4 focus groups with elderly, wheelchair users and visually impaired persons in the community were held to obtain qualitative insights into people’s views. With a focus on inclusivity in the research, 28 open space sites were selected based on its location, scale, urban type and user demographics to conduct specific site observation, user counting and activities data collection. Based on the observation data, 14 out of 28 sites were selected to conduct on-site polling with open space users on topics of inclusivity

Our vision with our community engagement is to use open spaces as a means to engage local community and stakeholders. The project presents a perfect opportunity towards private – public cooperation with the community as the focus of the user research. It fills a gap between city-wide topical research, and design studies around specific public space(s). Parks, privately owned public spaces, streets, and public facilities are all elements of public life that are connected to local culture and businesses serving residents. It allows us to draw comparisons between spaces of similar typologies, and understand how spaces can be studied in clusters against different kinds of data.

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Facing the undercurrents of rapid neighbourhood change, Tsuen Wan is presented with the challenge of a new-old divide. This project is an iterative process with an ambitious aim of realizing a neighbourhood commons, where neighbours in Tsuen Wan would come together as a whole to share and manage resources with a shared identity. With an in-depth research on the concept of commoning, the principles of developing an urban commons are introduced. Based on the principles, this project is downscaled to a neighbourhood scale – creating a neighbourhood commons. Eight local and international case studies are featured as a comparison through the lens of scale, depth and complexity.

Together with 40 civic design fellows and 39 corporate fellows, NIL embarked on a journey. Neighbourhood Commons@Tsuen Wan was carried out from October 2020 to June 2021. Over the eight-month period, NIL has reached out to stakeholders across sectors in Tsuen Wan, including neighbours, businesses, civic organisations, social innovators and corporate.

Following the three ideation tracks, three prototypes were developed and experimented with the public and corporate teams, namely Space As Commons, Neighbourhood Friendly Businesses Ecosystem and Neighbours-for-Neighbours Experiences. On open space, a piazza was selected as a site to experiment and test how public spaces (privately owned or publicly owned) can be co-managed by multiple parties. We co-hosted two co-creation pop-ups together with local NGOs and social enterprise, including Newlife 330, Green Common, Green ladies and HKFYG. On business collaboration, a questionnaire survey is designed and conducted with small scale businesses across sectors to validate and test the feasibility of the scheme.

The engagement process included 3 street polling sessions, an online survey, 5 focus group discussions, 40 1-1 interviews, 8 ideation and prototyping workshops, 17 co-creating experiences and an exhibition, engaging over 5800 audiences.

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In the light of climate change and extreme weather, potential flooding risks in Kowloon City have increased over the recent years. The proposal to build new drainage improvement facilities, including underground stormwater storage tank and at-grade pumping station, at Argyle Street Playground prompted the need to understand existing usage patterns and engage with stakeholders who will potentially be impacted by the construction.

By adopting a Design Thinking approach, a series of community engagement activities were devised to reimagine the future potential of the redeveloped open space and the stormwater storage scheme. Early in the process, four key topics were identified for discussion and definition. They include:

1. The current perception of the site

2. The redevelopment of sports and leisure facilities on site

3. The potential integration between leisure and cultural events on site

4. The exploration of public co-usage of the proposed stormwater storage facilities

Reflecting Kowloon City and its rich culture, Argyle Street Playground is an inherently complex site. Being the location of the third largest 7-a-side football pitch in Hong Kong, the annual site for three intangible cultural heritage festivals, and adjacent to one of the oldest Anglican church complex in Hong Kong, the site has long had a special place in the hearts of local residents from To Kwa Wan, Ma Tau Wai, Sung Wong Toi and Kowloon City. It remains a significant centre for Kowloon City and traditional Chinese culture.

While street polling and quantitative survey with local Kowloon City residents kickstarted the process in discovering issues related to the site, focus groups and 1-1 interviews reached out to specific interest groups and users of different ages to further define particular pain points and how the proposed drainage improvement public works can potentially impact their usage in the long-term. We have worked closely with the Holy Trinity Cathedral community, local cultural associations such as the Kowloon City Chiu Kiu Yue Lan Association and football enthusiasts throughout the Design Thinking process.

In May 2023, two co-creation workshops were subsequently held to deepen participants’ knowledge on the project and to explore potential design ideas for the overall scheme and stormwater storage tank co-use. Using results from the persona analysis, participants were invited to explore journeys as a user of the site and the pain points collected in the process serve to reinforce comments identified throughout the engagement process. Co-use scenarios and prototypes were created through the making of low fidelity models, discussions and self-reflection of public open space habits.

In all, we have engaged with over 500 persons, and reached out to over 30 local groups. A report consolidating all engagement findings, analysis and recommendations on the way forward for the design and consultation strategy of the detailed design stage were provided to the Drainage Services Department.

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