Running and Weaving
Chan Kam Fai;
Hong Kong Polytechnic University
This talk by Chan Kam Fai and Charis Poon from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University looks to Social Design Education in Hong Kong as a case study to explore creative pedagogies and how they shape students’ engagement with Social Design across changing contemporary conditions.
Running and Weaving: Social Design Education in Hong Kong examines the Capstone course for final-year students in the Social Design programme at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design. Over the past three years, Kam Fai and Charis Poon have designed, re-designed and re-redesigned successive rounds of curricular changes in response to, and in provocative engagement with Hong Kong’s contemporary conditions. These revisions have been informed by shifts in student cohorts, evolving conceptions of social design within the city, the emergence of new partnership opportunities, and new visions of possible futures they might collectively as a young body of social designers bring into existence. Drawing on these pedagogical iterations and selected student projects, Charis and Kam Fai will reflect on how the course positions the institution within Hong Kong’s wider social design ecology, and suggest a trajectory of what might come in the years ahead.
He initiates and curates several local intellectual projects, including Mundi (2017; independent research on critical theories and social praxis in the East Asian context), Omnia Omnibus (since 2016; seminars on contemporary discourses on technology, art, and forms of life), and the Ackbar Abbas translation project (since 2018). He is a founding member of Soil Trust (since 2021), an eco-social design project on interspecies intervention and soil-to-soil economy, which received the 2024 Don Norman Design Award.
Besides teaching, she makes zines, audio pieces, draws comics, and writes. Across these media, her practice focuses on the everyday, on contemplation, on close relationships. Charis worked as a freelance graphic designer and editor for most of her professional career, as well as working in creative strategy and podcasting. After finishing her MA in Design Expanded Practice at Goldsmiths University of London, she moved back to Hong Kong, where she calls home.