Kam Fai Chan

Lecturer, Teaching Fellow

V802c
+852 2766 5453
kam0fai.chan@polyu.edu.hk
Expertise: Social Design, Community Design Research, Social Design Philosophy

ORCID ID

Biography

Kam-Fai Chan teaches Social Design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He is interested in community-driven design, design sensemaking, social design philosophy, and contemporary discourses on design and social change. 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.

Education and Academic Qualifications

MA in Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong
BSSc in Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Teaching Area

Social Design
Community Design Research
Design Sensemaking
Social Design Philosophy

Research Outputs

Chan, K.F. & Poon, C.H. (2026). Untimely conversations: What are we talking about when we talk about Social Design. Exhibited in Assembling the Social: Acts of Caring, Nurturing, Repairing, and Imagining, 8 Feb - 8 Mar 2026, organised by the Social Design Lab, National University of Singapore, Singapore. https://cde.nus.edu.sg/event-detail/social-design-lab-sodl-exhibition-acts-of-caring-nurturing-repairing-and-imagining/

Wernli, M., Chan, K.F., Yu, J., and Wolper, J. (2026) "The meandering practitioner: When research emerges in relational resistance and intentional ambiguity," in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.811

Wernli, M., Chan, K.F., and Elkin, D. E. (2025). “Design with the past through organizational exaptation in rural Hong Kong,” Design Issues 41, no. 4: 49-65, https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI.a.713

Wernli, M. & Chan, K.F. (2024). "Rendering soil care across hotel, retailer, and farm with a mutuality service blueprint," in Gray, C., Ciliotta Chehade, E., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.415

Wernli, M. & Chan, K.F. (2023) “Designing with cosmotechnic difference, connecting foodwaste, landscapes, and livelihoods.” Contexts—The Systemic Design Journal, 2. https://doi.org/10.58279/v2001

Wernli, M. & Chan, K.F. (2023) “Provocation Soil Trust: designing economies inside an interspecies world of feeders.” Journal of Cultural Economy. Published online: August 10, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2023.2239823

Wernli, M. & Chan, K.F. (2023) “Are We Repairing Soils and Each Other Here? Exploring Design Cosmotechnics in the Waste Age.” In Repair and Design: Place, Practice & Community, pp.123-148. Edited by Eleni Kalantidou, Guy Keulemans, Abby Mellick Lopes, Niklavs Rubenis, and Alison Gill, published by Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46862-9_6

For more research outputs, please refer to ResearchGate.