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  

Dr Jorn Buhring’s article selected as Outstanding Paper in the 2020 Emerald Literati Awards

We are proud to announce that Dr Jörn Bühring’s article 'Designing memorable guest experiences: development of constructs and value generating factors in luxury hotels' has been selected as the Outstanding Paper in the 2020 Emerald Literati Awards. The editorial team said that it is one of the most exceptional pieces of work they saw throughout 2019. Bravo!!  The Emerald Literati Awards has a 25-year history in celebrating and rewarding the outstanding contributions of authors and reviewers to scholarly research. Read here for more about it. 

PolyU Design faculty in the 'Recognising Dedicated Educators' video

Here comes the “Recognising Dedicated Educators” video that celebrates the inspiring commitment of the colleagues from different PolyU's schools and faculties who make a difference in the lives of the students (and beyond). Four members from PolyU Design are one of them featured in the video (in order of appearance): Dr Ir Gerhard Bruyns, Associate Professor Dr Newman Lau, Associate Professor Dr Tina Luximon, Associate Professor Mr Michael Chan, Senior Teaching Fellow     Congratulations to these SDers and others from the PolyU! Thank you for your contribution!  

Available now: Cubic Journal #3 Design Making – The Values Had, The Object Made, the Value Had – Practice. Making. Praxis

Editor(s): Daniel Keith Elkin & James Stevens  With contributions from:David Schafer, Sara Codarin, Lee Y.H. Brian, Dr. Guan Lee, Daniel Widrig, Philippe Casens, Nathalie Bruyére, Kuo Jze Yi, Eddie Chan, Fernando Bales, Elise DeChard & Daniel Echeverri.  #Practice #Making #Praxis  This issue of Cubic Journal concerns making, and the value-structures connected to the premise, before and after execution. Fifteen authors and constituent research teams present their work in manifested design research here. In this work, physical, semi-physical, and transitionally physical embodiments of objects, spaces, and prototypical design conjectures are part and parcel of the researchers’ progress. Embodiment neither preempts, nor follows their work, but is essentially the substance of research itself within these manuscripts. The editors collected this work as status-taking for a broad range of creative and scholarly enterprises in several regions of the world. European, Southeast Asian, and American authors in architectural and product design fields provide perspectives on making-centric design research, across manual, digital, post-digital, and post-consumer spectra of fabrication. But as an assemblage, these works are more than a catalogue. They prompt retrospective thought on the values held, and the value given, by these authors’ conjectural experiments in material form.  Now available online and at JapSam Books.

Minor in Design: accepting application (2nd round)

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