Public open spaces (POS) is an integral part of our daily lives and relates to everyone in the community. This project encourages the adoption of design thinking in the POS development process, especially through engagement with various stakeholders, which is a key to designing innovative and diversified POS.

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.

• 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 localize 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.

An international symposium has been held in September 2023, with four thematic dialogues with global cases that demonstrate the use of design thinking for innovative POS design. A set of tailor-made design thinking toolkit have been developed in accordance with the Good Design-led Framework resulted from a participatory process for guiding sustainable POS development.

• 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 practicing on real cases, they will cultivate a culture towards design thinking and innovation as a habit and a mode of practice.