Design Trust shares ongoing and recent Grant and Fellowship programmes highlights including Feature Grant exhibition “Surviving Through the Cracks: Spontaneous Urban Landscapes of Hong Kong” led by Kate Lau; Seed Grant research “Tung Chung (un)rooted: Afterlives of Tung Chung Agricultural Cooperative Society” led by Stephanie Kwong, Silvia Tse and Christy Leung; Seed Grant research "Urban Ethnography: Re-Commoning Sheung Shui Tin Kwong Hui" publication by Jessy Yau, and ongoing grantee and fellowship programmes.
Design Trust Grant Programmes Spotlight & International News
16. 9. 2026
Design Trust Feature Grant research exhibition “Surviving Through the Cracks: Spontaneous Urban Landscapes of Hong Kong”, led by Kate Lau and her team of 2 Square Metres and WEEDsilience is currently on view at the Mills, Hong Kong. The project explores the ecological agency of spontaneous vegetation within Hong Kong’s hyper-dense urban fabric, reframing infrastructural fissures as vital microhabitats for climate-responsive design. Currently on view until November 15th 2026, the exhibition presents an ongoing germination experiment using custom concrete installations with simulated cracks embedded with local wild seeds. Over the next four months, the team will document plant adaptation and growth to re-examine the value of spontaneous vegetation for landscape resilience and urban biodiversity.
Design Trust Seed Grant research “Tung Chung (un)rooted: Afterlives of Tung Chung Agricultural Cooperative Society” led by Stephanie Kwong, Silvia Tse, and Christy Leung was recently featured at “Bookery” Art Book Fair in Macau on August 28th – 30th. The design research and community activation initiative delves into North Lantau’s evolving agrarian communal networks, utilizing participatory ethnography and speculative archiving to transform a dormant cooperative into a catalyst to spark new reflections about urban-rural symbiosis. The research documentation and an interactive digital map of the agriculture landscape of Tung Chung was presented at “Bookery” Art Book Fair in Macau to engage the Greater Bay Area community.
Design Trust Seed Grant research design research “Public Parasols: Stories of Shade in Subtropical Hong Kong” by Chang Su, is currently on display at the "A Temporary Exhibition of Temporal Public Spaces" at Taiwan Design Museum, until Sunday October 4th, 2026. The design prototype "Public Parasols" is featured among fifteen selected practices across East and Southeast Asia in the exhibition exploring how a new generation of Asian design practices addresses the rapid evolution of contemporary cities and public realms through critical inquiry and material innovation. The project was previously exhibited at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in spring 2026, and will continue to engage the communities in its following regional showcase.
Design Trust Graphic Archive Fellowship in partnership with HKDI exhibition photos, courtesy of HKDI.
Design Trust Graphic Archive Fellowship in partnership with HKDI has recently presented the research showcase “From here to there: How design moves Hong Kong” by the fellow Walter Chan at HKDI from June 9th to September 4th 2026. Revisiting the graphic design history of Hong Kong’s public transport from the 1940s to the 1980s, Walter explores the relationship between graphic design and user behaviour, on everyday commuting as a form of urban aesthetics. The showcase presented archive materials including transportation maps, public transportation tickets, MTR guidebooks which render the trasnformation of infrastuctural landscape of Hong Kong and the dynamic urban culture and design strategies through time.
Zine of research "Urban Ethnography: Re-Commoning Sheung Shui Tin Kwong Hui" by Jessy Yau, photos courtesy of the grantee.
Design Trust Seed Grant research "Urban Ethnography: Re-Commoning Sheung Shui Tin Kwong Hui" by Jessy Yau recently launched the publication on September 13th with a series of public tour and dialogue programmes. The design research initiative documents and reimagines Sheung Shui’s traditional morning market, Tin Kwong Hui, by elevating street markets from historical relics into evolving commons that sustain community identity and Hong Kong’s hawker history, bridging urban ethnography, architecture, and social science to preserve an ephemeral marketplace serving as a vital archive of local cultural memory, everyday resilience, and grassroots livelihoods.
International News & Highlights
A Feast of Light, installation view detail of Julie & Jesse’s Without Leaving your Room Vessel 3 and Vessel 4, Homo Faber 2026 – An Island of Light, © Julie & Jesse, Photography by Julie Progin
We are delighted to share alumni Design Trust mentees Julie Progin and Jesse Mc Lin have recently exhibited at “Homo Faber 2026: An Island of Light” in Venice, the world’s leading contemporary craft biennial curated by the Michelangelo Foundation under the artistic direction of Es Devlin. The duo joined more than 400 master artisans, artists and designers from over 70 countries at the Giorgio Cini Foundation on San Giorgio Maggiore Island in an exhibition that explores the fundamental relationship between light, materials and the human hand. For the 2026 edition, Julie and Jesse have presented “Without Leaving your Room” Vessel 3 and Vessel 4, two white sculptural porcelain vases poetically exploring the chemistry of glaze. To create this body of work for “An Island of Light”, they developed a method to sculpt with glaze, fashioning a new technique and language displaying delicate formations that grow, float and shift from porcelain vases. Julie and Jesse previously participated in Design Trust Futures Studio 2019 and 2022 editions, and received Design Trust Arts Prize Dynamic Duos in 2024. The biennale exhibition “Homo Faber 2026: An Island of Light” is currently on view until September 30th 2026.
Built upon Design Trust Feature Grant symposium "Tolerance and Transformation" hosted at Asia Society Hong Kong in January 2024, the publication “Material, Making and Place: A Playbook for Resource-Conscious Architecture”, led by Donn Holohan and Elspeth Lee, is recently published by RIBA. This book examines how architecture is shaped by the material and systemic conditions through which it is made. Drawing on over a decade of practice, teaching, and research, grantees Donn Holohan and Elspeth Lee investigate alternative, resource-conscious frameworks for spatial creation. By exploring material supply, labor, fabrication, and regulation across contemporary projects in Europe and Asia, the publication challenges standardized construction supply chains and positions material feedback and community-led methodologies at the core of sustainable architectural design.