Publications

Hong Kong is a compact and densely populated area, parks are of paramount importance to high-density cities like Hong Kong. The “Intergenerational Play Space Design Competition | HKHS Prosperous Garden” co-organised by HKHS and JCDISI provided a platform for professionals and university students from different disciplines to reimagine public space and playground for IG interactions. This report documents participating teams' design ideas, deliberations with local stakeholders, experts' vision and the judges' comments on the winning designs as a book of reference to inspire on how to take the IG play space design idea forward.

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Public open spaces in Hong Kong are generally zoned and demarcated by their functions and targeted users. While the equipment are monotonous and may not satisfy the needs of different age groups and discourages interactions. “Kowloon Park Fitness Trail Proof of Concept Study” took forward design considerations developed in Season 4 to test the applicability of such principles. With LCSD and ArchSD as Strategic Partners to provide technical advice, the cross-discipline knowledge creation and knowledge transfer exercise fleshed out practical considerations and provides a reference design for future development.

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When was the last time you played with somebody beyond your generation? What are your desires for an ideal play space? The benefits of play space to everyone’s physical and mental well-being has remained important, if not more important, than ever in light of COVID-19. The Season 4 Summary Report compiled the takeaways of Co-creation Workshop and Symposium, in which the co-created ideas were further explored in our action projects.

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The "Double Smart Assessment Indicators for Elderly-friendly Community" provides an easy-to-use assessment tool for the community to understand the needs of the elderly and areas where prioritised actions are required, thus introducing community- and user-oriented hardware and software solutions to support the elderly to age at home and in place.

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Many elderly people are still active and healthy in their post-retirement life. These retirees would like to continue to give play to their strengths and contribute to society. The “Report On Silver Age Startups in Hong Kong” catalogued the challenges, achievements, and gains of a group of senior citizens rewarded from the process of creating new social enterprises, and also demonstrated the unlimited possibilities of “Active Ageing”.

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With technological advancements, various social sectors strive to find innovative and smart solutions to tackle the challenges caused by double ageing and to make the community and user experience more elderly-friendly. With the theme of "Enabling Smart Ageing with Health and Building Data”, Season 10 promoted the building of a digital platform for systematic integration, analysis and visualisation of practical knowledge and data, so that the young old can better assess their ability in and prepare for ageing in place.

How can a robot assist older elderly who are not familiar with technology in achieving “Active Ageing”? The “Report on Co-designing Interactive Voice Response Robor for Elderly Centre” not only documented the process which “Tung Zai” is born, but also demonstrated the way technology integrates into elderly’s everyday life. Witness together how elderly co-created “Tung Zai” by reading the report!

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GOActive.hk:Whatare the concerns when designing a digital platform for elderly to registeractivities organised by elderly centres? The report “GOActive.hk: ConnectingCity-Wide Users through an Elderly-Friendly Website” documented the wholeprocess of the Action Project, including the design principles and theirapplications discovered during a series of user engagement workshops. Find outmore details of the platform design by studying the report![No text in field]

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From planning to implementation, what challenges did the Silver Age DJs face when producing this online music sharing programme? How did they overcome the difficulties? The “Silver Age DJ Action Project Report” not only documented the whole process of the Action Project, but also summarises some suggestions and principles from the experience of the Silver Age DJ pilot programme on encouraging members of the elderly centre to initiate self-organising activities. Find out what elderly DJs were doing along the way by reading the report!

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In order to encourage our society to think about how to cope with the “double ageing” issue in our society, this project aims to pool together efforts from different parties to re-design and improve the existing iron trolley used by elderly waste pickers, to make it safer, easier to use and be more adaptable to the local urban landscape and usage practices. We asked the University’s Industrial Centre to produce 4 prototypes of the Recycling Trolley; and invited four elderly waste pickers from different districts to conduct field testing and summarized our experience in this report.

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Stemmed from Season 2’s theme of “Empathising with Elderly in Workplace”, a design scheme was developed for a community waste management centre for garbage collection, waste recycling, and pioneering provision of decent space and facilities to serve our cleaning worker. This is a feasible prototype for a new generation of government refuse collection points that can stand as an icon of functionality and community pride.

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Since 2015, Good Seed have supported over 80 social projects, all dedicated to bettering the lives of different people in Hong Kong through innovation. Focusing on projects launched in 2018-2020, this book tells the stories of 25 of these projects, charting not just their success, but also hardships and failures along the way. They show that initiating and sustaining an innovation project is no easy task, but by following a desire to do good for society, anyone could become a change maker.

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The Transitional Social Housing Action Project covered three sites with varying physical and socio-economic environment, i.e. a temporary work site at the intersection of Tung Chau Street and Yen Chow Street West in Sham Shui Po, the former SKH Stanley Village Primary School in Stanley, and the Ma Wan Old Village. The Report provides a comprehensive documentation of the cross-sector and trans-disciplinary co-creation process which has contributed to enriching the knowledge in the planning, designing and implementing transitional social housing projects in Hong Kong.

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As a SoInno Action Project for promoting "Elderly-friendly Employment", we examined "Chan Un Chan Third Age Volunteers Centre cum Community Kitchen” operated by the TWGHs and published "The Toolkit for the Age-friendly Community Kitchen", which illustrating universal design on 8 aspects namely "Layout & Furnishing", "Operation Routing & Logistics", "Labels & Signage", "Equipment", "Training", "Inspections & Records", "Menu & Recipe" and "Incentives" for age-friendly community kitchens.

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"Co-Designing Iron Trolley for Cardboards Recycling" is one of the SoInno Action Project to promote "Elderly-friendly Employment" with the aims to improving the trolley used by elderly waste pickers. After a more than 6-month co-creation , the process and detailed design are ready for public reference. Don't miss out!

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The interim report highlights the issues and challenges in identified in the season 1 co-creation process and at the Symposium and the seven conceptual design schemes developed by the co-creation teams.

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A book recording 31 successful and touching stories of the Good Seed projects. Good Seed programme has supported 45 social projects since 2015. Some of them generate unprecedented solutions, some of them successfully converge societal goals, some of them are in full swing, some of them has already hit the sack. In this book, 31 adventurers have been recorded with a humanistic perspective instead of merely numbers and assessments, for they are only humans with good hearts trying to do good for Hong Kong.

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In a world of unprecedented changes and uncertainties, our next generation needs to be equipped with appropriate skills to solve real-world problems. Design thinking, an approach to solving novel problems, can be situated in education to help students learn to solve ill-defined problems, practice empathy, think critically, as well as think creatively. This paper will describe an experiential learning opportunity whereby secondary school students experienced the stages of design thinking through a workshop. There were many gains, including an increase in the students’ level of creativity, as well as a heightened awareness of the needs of others. This study shows that experiencing design thinking can be beneficial to secondary students as they acquire essential skills for the future.

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The study reported in this paper examines an under-researched aspect of design thinking (DT) in teacher education. While DT has popularized for responding to the needs of 21st century teaching and learning, there have been very few attempts to gauge the voices of teachers as non-designers and how they master the related knowledge, skills, and attitudes of DT. To illustrate this, Retna (2016) notes that very limited empirical evidence has navigated teachers’ voices throughout the implementation process and endeavored to respond to this gap. There is also a wider issue here about how teacher education institutes prepare for a 21st century teaching force that can respond to uncertainties and with this in mind the current paper draws on the voices of 24 pre-service teachers at a leading university in Asia. Through understanding this important learning process of facilitating DT workshops we hope to show how pre-service teachers, as non-designers confront the challenges and show development in the important mindsets associated with DT. There is a lack of attention invested in such process (Diefenthaler et al, 2017) and the current paper seeks to better understand it.

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Adolescents’ classroom experiences have a long-term impact on their future education and life chances (Kramer, 1991). Long have achievement gaps among students been recognized, so it is crucial to explore different instructional strategies that can improve learning outcomes for all (Okoye-Johnson, 2011). Design thinking has been widely applied in business settings and a growing trend has been observed in the K12 classroom as well. Yet, little is known on the effects of such application on different learning outcomes (Razzouk & Shute, 2012). In responding to this gap, the current study stems from the second year of a 3-year project that offers subjectbased design thinking workshops to secondary schools in Hong Kong. Adopting a mixedmethods approach, this study aims to unpack the learning experiences of students engaged in this innovative curriculum initiative with depth and breadth. Findings inform policymakers and fieldwork practitioners who seek to nurture students for the 21st century.

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Design thinking (DT) is a human-centric, iterative and interactive problem-solving process that captures how designers innovate and problem-solve. Such important skill set has become one of the most crucial skill set in the knowledge society of the twenty-first century (OECD, 2015). Thus, DT has been widely applied in business education and social innovation, and a similar trend has also been observed in the field of education (Carroll et al, 2010) and yet, there is a paucity of study that try to understand the important learning outcomes of such application (Taheri et al, 2016) and to empower teachers to adopt DT as a pedagogy (Panke, 2019). This presentation highlights a cross-university collaboration on nurturing 21st century skills in pre-service, in-service teachers and students with an experiential learning process through DT workshops.

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One of three JCDISI projects featured in the Hong Kong Report on the State of Sustainable Built Environment 2020 (Hong Kong Report 2020) to showcase Hong Kong's accomplishments in striving to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals among the 102 selected projects.

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One of three JCDISI projects featured in the Hong Kong Report on the State of Sustainable Built Environment 2020 (Hong Kong Report 2020) to showcase Hong Kong's accomplishments in striving to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals among the 102 selected projects.

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One of three JCDISI projects featured in the Hong Kong Report on the State of Sustainable Built Environment 2020 (Hong Kong Report 2020) to showcase Hong Kong's accomplishments in striving to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals among the 102 selected projects.

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Supported by the Chinese National Engineering Research Centre For Steel Construction (Hong Kong Branch), JCDISI worked together with Leigh & Orange Limited and WSP to investigate how the modern technology of MiC can help address the unprecedented challenge of transitional housing in Hong Kong. After months of investigation, the study aims at identifying key technical issues and proposing an adaptable solution in form of a relocatable MiC building system prototype is now released.

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For high density urban areas, promoting walkability is conducive to enhancing age-friendliness of cities and communities. Walkable environment enhances the levels of physical activities, which will finally improve physical and mental health of older people. This paper measures walkability scores for the whole territories of Hong Kong, based on residential density, street connectivity, and land-use mix. Results indicate that downtown areas (i.e., Hong Kong Island and Kowloon) have higher walkability scores than New Territories. Area-based walkability is positively associated with population density and employment rate in tertiary sectors, and is negatively associated with household income and size of the land. Interview with planning professionals suggests that different planning paradigms in downtown and New Territories give rise to various levels of walkability. Land lots are smaller, and the streets are narrower in old urban areas, which promote human and commercial activities. However, the highly congregated development mode has negative impacts on the public health. Future development shall seek a balance between plot size and diversity in the zoning process. Quantitative methods should be enriched by other methods to propose strategies oriented to the enhancement of elderly livability and well-being.

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Population ageing and building stock ageing are usually tackled as two separate subjects and each has already received much attention. However, the Hong Kong community at large is less aware that the combined impact of population ageing and building ageing, i.e. “double ageing”, is a much more complex issue to address. If not tackled properly and in a timely manner, “double ageing” as a socio-economic issue will have significant impact on the sustainable development of Hong Kong, significantly affecting the liveability and resilience of the city. The first objective of this paper is to elaborate on the problems and evaluate existing efforts in tackling the challenge. This paper advocates an integrated, people-centric “double-smart” approach to leverage the merits of smart ageing and smart city in tackling double-ageing and bring positive changes for the city.

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The supply of social welfare sites and premises is perceived by the general public or social welfare counterparts to fall under the realm of land and urban planning. This perception is not incorrect. Yet, I wish to point out that as a pre-requisite to accomplish the concerned tasks, both planners and the Planning Department (PlanD) must secure the collaboration and cooperation of various parties. We also need to view from the perspective of social innovation in opening up our minds, broadening our horizon, triggering collective wisdom, and coordinating the endeavours and cooperation of different parties with a view to identifying the possible way forward for increasing the supply of social welfare sites and premises.

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Around the world, countries are hosting rapidly accelerating aging populations, with many establishing and implementing building guidelines to ensure successful aging-in-place as a response. Universal design has been adopted as a general approach, with the endorsement of UNCRPD and WHO. Best practices have also been proposed in some nations to set an even higher standard to guide the industry. At the same time, the prevalence of dementia is increasing. Following the emergence of Evidence/Research-Based Design and Salutogenic Design, design for the elderly no longer comprises discrete considerations of mobility or sensory deficits, but incorporates a continuum of physical, mental, cognitive and psychosocial factors in one holistic approach. Such an approach will benefit people of all ages. For a vertical city like Hong Kong, it can be adapted to suit high rise living and mass ground movement of the densely distributed city network. ("Double Aging" refers to the phenomenon of simultaneous occurrence of an aging population and aging building stock, having profound impacts on society and urban living.)

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It has been nearly a half century since Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China began promoting the accessible environment in the early 1970s. Starting from describing the international transformation on the concept of “Disability”, this paper first sorts out the theoretical development in Hong Kong including “Physically Handicapped and Able-Bodied”,“Barrier-free Design” and “Universal Design”; Then clarifies the promotion mechanism of the accessible environment from the perspective of policies and regulations, investments and the coordination between different institutions; After that, the achievements on residential buildings, public spaces and tourist attractions are introduced. At last, how mainland China can learn from Hong Kong’s experiences and apply that in construction tasks of related facilities when promoting the accessible environment are discussed.

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Prof. HSIA Chu Joe specialises in architecture and urban research in Taiwan. His book “The Tale of Three Cities” offers a collection of notes on three cities, Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Taiwan, in the global information age. Limited copies available upon request.

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Mr. CHAN Koonchung, a prominent writer and cultural figure in the Chinese-reading community, laid the groundwork for social innovation by extrapolating local wisdom to construct the parameters of a good society. In his book, “Living Out the Contradiction of Our Time”, he explored the types of education and social innovation that will allow the next generation to respond to unstoppable advances in technology. Limited copies available upon request.

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Prof. Matthew TURNER, Professor Emeritus of Edinburgh Napier University, has had a long career in Hong Kong that has allowed him to witness the city’s transformation; he is undoubtedly an interesting and knowledgeable figure to envision Hong Kong’s future. In his book, “Tête-à-êtet” addresses two related questions, namely “what is social innovation?” and “what does social innovation mean and what could it mean for Hong Kong?”