Winter Greetings from Design Trust | Message from Executive Director

Message from Marisa Yiu, Co-Founder / Executive Director

Design Trust wishes you a happy new year with good health, energy and seasonal celebration with loved ones. The year of 2022 represents so much for all of us, a year of challenges, ongoing pressures of the environment, health and wellbeing; yet, it has also demonstrated an energetic restoration of our community’s strength to come together, and remain optimistic through creative collaboration. Design has the role to knit communities together openly, and cultural collaboration especially across borders whether physical and virtual, shown by our latest and third micro-park unveiling.

With the new permanent home Design Trust Studio as a multi-purpose community space, contemporary archive and gallery space for regional and international design and research projects, I am thrilled to share we have supported 523 grantees, fellows and mentee designers to its collaborators to date since 2014. More than eight years ago, we created this initiative with a sincere commitment to advance design competency, catalysing our programmes to benefit and inspire the public on the role of design, as well as supporting emerging scholars and designers research on urgent topics. Throughout the year 2022 and looking ahead to 2023, we will continue to share great works from past grantees, ongoing and new programmes, to create exciting and meaningful engagement and experimentation in Hong Kong and beyond.

Recently, we saw research and design projects supported by our Design Trust Feature and Seed Grants being presented at leading international exhibitions and platforms. Feature Grant project “Split Lives: Stories from the Underground House” led by University of Hong Kong Department of Architecture academic and architect researchers, Joshua Bolchover and John Lin of Rural Urban Framework, is featured in the 17th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. In November 2022, we received the good news that the photographic and research works from Design Trust Seed Grant project “BRUTAL! - Unknown Brutalism Architecture in Hong Kong” led by Bob Pang, received Dezeen Awards 2022 “Winner for Architecture Photograph of the Year” in both Public Vote and Jury Prize, marking the first Hong Kong-based project to win such honour. Congratulations to Kevin Mak and the team!

Apart from international outreach, our core focus remains focused on Hong Kong, as well as its neighbouring cities and region. In 2017, we expanded our work with the DESIGN TRUST FUTURES STUDIO programme – building public space prototypes and pilot projects, engaging with private and public sector to innovate on heritage, and examining the power and positive elements of smallness in design to make larger impacts. This community think-tank programme continues to grow in strength. With Yi Pei Square Playground and Portland Street Rest Garden already becoming part of Hong Kong’s vibrant public space and community everyday life, we are excited to softly launch the Sitting-out Area under Flyover in Hill Road, Shek Tong Tsui in December 2022, which will be fully completed in February 2023. In the meantime we continue working hard on the last upcoming micro-park Hamilton Street Rest Garden in Yau Tsim Mong district, scheduled to be opened early next year. Continuing this pilot programme, we are also keen to see how DESIGN TRUST will play an active role to respond to recent government policy announcements on how 170 public spaces in Hong Kong will be revitalized in the near future.

This year’s DESIGN TRUST FUTURES STUDIO 2022 theme “Heritage is Creative Generation”, unlike other earlier editions, a total of six months, includes the research, preparation with a three-month long making and crafting programme as an accelerated version of DESIGN TRUST FUTURES STUDIO, spurred further by a creative urgency to explore physical/virtual cultural making, whilst researching on the history of craft and dialogue around positive values of Chinese heritage and legacy building foregrounded the collective efforts. With our lead commissioning partner Hong Kong Palace Museum, that opened to the public in July 2022, and inspired by Project Twelve, a cultural and design exploratory project using a theme of the twelve animal signs of the Chinese zodiac, we continue its ethos and future creative generation of new zodiac design objects to cultivate new contemporary approaches to making as an intellectual endeavor whilst inspired by the past.

Building upon M+ / Design Trust Research Fellowship’s long-term partnership with M+ Museum, since 2014, we celebrated the museum’s opening and the past fellows’ accomplishment through co-organizing ‘Research on the Move: Dialogues with M+ / Design Trust Research Fellows’ on June 25th 2022, the first gathering of former eight research fellows and teams, as the first public symposium event at the Grand Stair of M+ and online. In the near future, we will strive to expand and launch new design and research fellowship and programmes with existing and new partners in Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Macau of the Greater Bay Area, and further to Shanghai; whilst amplifying our international cultural exchanges in various cities worldwide.

To continue our work with optimism and focus, I would like to express gratitude to the continuous support of all past and present members who have brought us to where we are today, Chairman, Board members in the last years and to the unwavering support of all the Trustees, Supporters, Partners, and Advisors to DESIGN TRUST to enable us to do what we are passionate about. With new challenges, changes in our environment to urgent social impact projects to continue with, we cannot thank again all the great work of community, and team members of our organization. On behalf of my team and colleagues, thank you again for your continuous support and generosity to our work in the foundation.

We thank you for entrusting in design, please join our community in supporting the growth of the design and cultural ecology here in Hong Kong, our region and our future. Sending our warmest thoughts and best wishes for a wonderful winter season ahead, and a very happy new year. See you soon in 2023!

Stay healthy, creative and inspired!

Marisa Yiu,

Co-Founder /Executive Director, Design Trust

Winter 2022, Hong Kong