ENTER21 eConference's Full Paper Award results announced

We are excited to learn that Mr Bruce Wan and Dr Kenny Chow have won First Place of the Full Paper Award with their co-authors Cees de Bont (our former Dean) and Paul Hekkert at the ENTER21 eConference held on 19-22 January.    The paper “Finding meaning through travel journaling: a strength-based approach’ was selected out of the three finalists. The study was on the creation of an interactive journaling platform that supports people in creating memorable and meaningful tourism experiences with their photos taken from their journeys. Before getting into the finalist stage, the paper had passed the first-round screening that only 55 papers out of the 88 submissions were accepted.  The article is on OpenAccess and available for download. Click HERE. ENTER Conference is an annual event of IFITT community. The conference offers a worldwide and unique forum for attendees from industry, academia, government, and other organisations to actively exchange, share, and challenge state-of-the-art research and industrial case studies on the application of information and communication technologies in travel and tourism.   Congratulations!

Students shine at 2020 HK4As Students’ Award

Congratulations to the PolyU Design teams on receiving prizes at the 2020 HK4As Students’ Award! The Silver winner beat other contestants with their ‘流⽔⾳樂節’ proposal and the team was formed by CHEUNG Chi Ho and CHAN Kit Fu Jeff from Advertising Design Year 3, KWONG Chi Wing from Advertising Design Year 2 and NG Ho Man from Communication Design Year 3 (in the photo). At the same time, YIP Ka Chun, year 4 student of Advertising Design, created the '地球的新衣' that won him a Merit. The competition’s theme of this year is ‘Unbottle Water’ that the contestants were briefed to create an integrated branding campaign to promote the new launch of unbottle water. Judging was based on the creativity, meaningfulness and execution of the entry. The Award established since 1990 has been a prominent competition designed to encourage, develop and nurture young talents in the advertising industry. ____________ Photo by courtesy of HK4As（香港廣告商會）

Vote for student Analyn Yap from MDes Interaction Design for Interaction Awards 2021

We are happy to announce that our MDes Interaction Design student Analyn L. Yap (Tata) is a Finalist of the The submission in the theme of Connecting, under the Student/Concept category is based on her capstone project "Bukas: Material Messages for Filipino Migrant Workers and Their Transnational Families" which looks into the everyday life and mental world of Filipino workers in Hong Kong. Supervised by Associate Professor Dr Huaxin Wei, the project is intended to address the need for self-identity formation and facilitate the expression of achievements and vulnerability, using a tangible, symbolic medium that carries material meanings for both the migrant worker and the families back home.  Every entry at the Interaction Awards is considered and reviewed by industry leaders, hiring managers, and industry peers within the Awards jury and IxDA Peer Review Committee. All winning and finalist work is added to a living library created to help people discover the best work and uncover trends, insights, and talent that defines excellence, in addition to being featured on online media and as case studies that celebrate designers and their processes.*  The competition is now inviting public voting for the 2021 People’s Choice Award. Give your vote to Tata’s work if you like it! Learn more __________________ *Information  from awards.ixda.org

Call for participants in a travel experience study

PolyU Design is looking for travellers who have had memorable and meaningful cultural tourism experiences to take part in a research project. Your involvement will contribute to the tourism experience design. Click HERE to get more details and enroll in our study.

Digital Media's animation project with Towngas to spread positivity among stay-at-home kids under COVID-19

Under the COVID-19 pandemic, primary and secondary school students are mostly required to stay home for online learning. In light of that, The Hong Kong and China Gas Company Limited (Towngas) initiated an animation project with The Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design and the Hong Kong Baptist University with a target to providing online educational resource on environment protection and general knowledge, while passing on the messages of positivity among our younger generation. The university students teamed up to produce a series of interesting animations which incorporated positive messages for children. Parents and teachers can make utilise the video clips to initiate meaningful dialogues with the school kids.  Among the final video clips, the animation “Puzzle” created by CHAN Sze Ming, CHOI Hoi Ching and FRANCISCO Miyuki of the BA(Hons) in Digital Media programme led by Teaching Fellow Step Cheung stood out for its heartwarming story and the refined details in character design.  The story of “Puzzle” is set against the background of the current “new normal” where children are staying home for online learning. It starts with an everyday online class when the teacher found his students not paying attention to him. To better engage the students, he invited everyone in the class to take part in doing a painting together to show their appreciation for health-care workers who are fighting the pandemic for mankind. This successfully enhanced a lively class interaction and got the students all working towards a common objective. The story ends with a thank you message for health-care workers, expressed by a happy and high-spirit class.  The collaboration is part of the SD4964 Co-operative Project subject under Work-Integrated Education. The subject provides final year students with opportunities to join collaborative projects sponsored by clients in both the commercial and non-profit sectors, to give students working experience in a real-life environment so that students will be able to better appreciate what they learn in class, to integrate theory with practice, to enhance all-round development and to make better career plan.  This is the first time Towngas collaborated with School of Design for the subject and the outcomes are satisfactory and mutually beneficial. 

Dr Jörn Bühring spoke at different international forums

Dr Jörn Bühring was invited to talk at the “New Forms of Business, New Education – 2020 International Forum for Digital Creative Design” held on 11 to 15 December 2020. With 150 experts attending this forum and an audience of over 20,000 people joining through online channels, the forum was a huge success and one of the most magnificent international events in the field of digital creative design in 2020.  The title of his talk was “Strategic Design & Future Thinking”. Dr Bühring was also a speaker at the “2020 Insight – Lifestyle and Design Innovation Forum” organised by TrendTouch of Tsinghua University last month, which was live-streamed to 25,000 participants across China and beyond. His talk was on futures thinking and life-centric design.

PolyU Design Scholars and Student won Best Paper Award at ArtsIT Conference

We are excited to announce that the recent peer-reviewed and SCOPUS Indexed paper titled ‘Data City: Leveraging Data Embodiment towards Building the Sense of Data Ownership’ by Prof. Stephen J. Wang (Professor in UX Design & Design Intelligence), Dr Jeffrey Ho (Assistant Professor), and our recent graduate of MDes (Interaction Design) Mr Allen Xie have just won the Best Paper Award at the 9th European Alliance of Innovation (EAI) ArtsIT Conference (2020). The conference which was organised in Denmark and took place virtually this year brings together people from across various art forms with a keen interest in modern IT technologies. The Best Paper Award is the highest honour for the paper authors of this competitive international conference with a paper acceptance rate of less than 40%. The Best Paper explores the emerging area of research of Human-Data Interaction (HDI), investigates people's perception, behaviour and attitude towards data via qualitative research. The authors leveraged embodied interactions to enhance the sense of data ownership and proposed a novel Augmented Reality installation 'DataCity' as a sample application to achieve this goal and provide potential impact to this field. There were three other papers by MDes (Interaction Design) students accepted and published at this conference’s Special Track “Intelligence & creativity in Healthcare, Wellbeing & Aging” this year. The Track was led by Prof. Stephen J. Wang, supported by three world-leading design institutions: the Royal College of Art, Tsinghua University and PolyU. The authors of these papers are: Muñoz, Daniel; Chow, Kenny K. N.; Wei, Huaxin. 'Effects of Virtual Reality in the Area of Responsible Decision-making Training on Adolescents.' Yan, Yuxiang; Wei, Huaxin; Ho, Jeffrey C. F.; Yap, Analyn. 'A Budget Setting System as an Intervention for Reducing Personal Expense for Chinese Young Generation.' Yap, Analyn; Wei, Huaxin; Chow, Kenny K. N.. 'Bukas: Material Messages for Filipino Migrant Workers and Their Transnational Families.' Congratulations to all winners and authors!

Launch of Household Accounting Survey web application

The Household Accounting Survey web application is the first data visualization tool from HomeWise Research and Design, by Assistant Professor Daniel Elkin and is funded by PolyU Design. John F.C. Turner developed the Household Accounting Survey to measure housing suitability. The web application is the first to apply this housing science method through a digital platform. Anyone who submits a full survey response can compare their housing conditions with Regional and Global respondents' to compare their priorities to others’ locally and around the world.   This web application helps respondents inventory their housing priorities and see how their housing satisfaction compares with other users. For researchers, it creates a detailed record of what respondents expect from their housing all over the world.   Visit HomeWise.design today to complete the Household Accounting Survey. Check in often to see more data tools, research, and design from HomeWise!   https://www.homewise.design/  

Brian Kwok's interview on The Culturist

Mr Brian Kwok, Associate Professor and Information Design Lab Leader, talks about his new book 'City of Script' and the conservation of visual culture of Hong Kong on The Culturist. Click here to read.

PolyU Design launches Design-Centred Entrepreneurship training programme for startups with Hong Kong Design Centre

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design (PolyU Design) launched the ‘HKDCxSD-Design-Centred Entrepreneurship’ programme with Hong Kong Design Centre (HKDC) to establish a new ecosystem conducive to the development of design entrepreneurs in the urban community environment, and to promote the value creation of excellent enterprises with design, to achieve the new entrepreneurship with a design-centered idea.  Officially launched on the 11th of November, 2020, the programme is offering course training, seminars, and workshops lasting for two months and provides 38 design start-ups from HKDC’s Design Incubation Programme (DIP) with design and business thinking collision. It enables design-centered start-ups to cultivate and develop the key knowledge and skills needed for entrepreneurship in the 21st century and build an innovation platform for academic and commercial integration.  The programme team combines the professional strength and international vision of PolyU Design in the field of design research and professional education, as well as HKDC’s knowledge and experience in the design industry and innovation ecology of Hong Kong. It goes for the cooperation mode of industry-university cooperation and mutual benefit.  For details of the programme, please visit here. ----------------------------------- The programme team includes the following members from PolyU Design: Advisor: Prof. Kun-Pyo Lee Content manager: Prof. Kevin Denny Project manager: Dr Sylvia Liu Trainers: Dr Henry Ma, Dr Newman Lau, Dr Jörn Bühring, Scott Chin, William Liang, Benny Leong Project Assistants: Tiffany Fong, Das Bharati, Bing Zheng