Enabled by design: enquiry into the living patterns of Hong Kong high-rise communities

This paper also intends to explore the possibility of making this experience a foundation for future models of pedagogy. The learning processes mention would not only happen exclusively within the campus, but would also be open to the community and public. This paper reports the process and results of a survey developed as a collaboration between a design researcher in participation, design educators, a sociologist, local activists, design students and their families and friends. We discussed how this model could be an exploration for forming a community for enquiry. This process advocated the use of open enquiry, common tool creation and co-learning activity to carry out the research. This is an on-going process and we will discuss its latest development: from design education to civic education to create tools and platforms for an archive of Hong Kong lived-in homes. INTRODUCTION Could there be a designerly way of enquiry for social situations? And what is the specificity of designerly ways of enquiry in design education? This paper reflects on the enabling process of sharing design language as a method to engage students and residents in articulating and understanding their living spaces. We aim to extend the historical approach of design education: ‘designerly ways of knowing’ (Cross, 1982) which forms the discourse of how design becomes a discipline of enquiry. This paper reports a recent project we studied about the living condition of public housing estates in Hong Kong. The whole process involved 40 design students at High Diploma level. They were asked to practice their architectural drawing technique and create spatial representations (floor plans and photos) to engage the residents (including themselves) to record the usages and designs of their homes in public housing estates. All the apartments they recorded are designed and constructed in a similar way of being standardised and serialised; and the spaces produced are thus repeated and refined. The results are 100 floor plans that recorded the actual usage of the living units. These 100 cases reflect how the residents use everyday design thinking to interact with the constraints of these standardised spaces. The emphasis of the discussion is on the co-creation process and enabling process of the enquiry. For co-creation, we mean that both parties would have input into the generation of knowledge. By sharing the design tools, both the designers (design students) and residents could benefit from the research process. Designers will be better informed about how their designs are actually ‘used’; through enabling the public to engage with the design language. Residents would be better able to understand their homes in comparison with others in a similar situation. As raised in the previous paper, we suggested that both social science and design have quite similar nature of being pragmatic and practical. But more the important part would be the differences between them, which make the interchange and cross-disciplinary research meaningful (Lee, et al., 2012). This paper wants to further enquire what exactly could designerly way of thinking and research provide for investigating social condition. And what is the specificity of designerly ways of enquiry in design education. Residential tower blocks are forming the backdrop to many urban cities but we know very little about the private spaces within them. Unlike ‘Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) ‘studies by professionals that focus on process, functional and technical performance (RIBA, 2006), we set out a study that went behind the facades. We tried to explore the domestic interiors, observed and recorded how residents‘ responses to standard spaces and how they have affected their own living spaces. In POE studies, residents / occupiers / users are usually just one group of participants set amongst clients, designers, managers and other professionals. Studies that consider issues in terms of design are also rare. However, having more knowledge of how residents occupy their dwellings must be of use to designers and architects; better informing them of how their designs are ‘used’. Research like this also helps ordinary members of the public to engage with the language of design and satisfy our curiosity to know more about the homes of others. Based this rationale, we initiated a study with tutors from Interior Design, Landscape Architecture and Product Design and 40 of their High Diploma level students They were asked to practice their architectural drawing technique and create spatial representations (floor plans and photos) to engage the residents (including themselves) to record the usages and designs of their homes in public housing estates (Figure 1). The results are 100 floor plans that recorded the actual usage of the living units. These 100 cases reflect how the residents use everyday design thinking to interact with the constraints of these standardised spaces. Figure 1. Research tool developed by students to engage people to actualize their home space The roles of the design students in the study were multiple. First of all they were learning through applying their architectural drawing technique; and instead the usual practice of using drawings to depict spatial design, they also had to put this set of skill in a new context for comprehension. The students also had to view the drawing technique as an engaging and enquiry tool. They were also to a certain extent educators; they were in fact transferring the basic design language of design to the informants/residents, so that the residents could be aware and review their usage through the graphic representations. OPEN ENQUIRY OF RESIDENTS’ RESPONSES How do residents respond to standardised spaces to create their own homes? As Le Corbusier explained in his analogy of standardisation, “. [s]tandard components are letters; with those letters, in a particular way, you have to spell out the names of your future house owners” (Boudon,1972). Residents are ‘overwriting’ the text laid down by the architect, creating ‘designs by inhabitation’. This standardisation approach inspired diverse design participation concepts. One of them is the advocacy-planning concept, which encourages the positive role of citizens and works against the totalitarian formalisation of citizen participation. “The difficulty with current citizen participation programmes is that citizens are more often reacting to agency programmes than proposing their concepts of appropriate goals and future action” (Davidoff, 1965, 1996, p.392). A good architectural example of advocacy-planning is the Byker redevelopment in Newcastle-uponTyne (1969-1975) where architect Ralph Erskine opened an on-site office to engage future tenants during the design process of their new homes. The Segal Method is another design participation example that was developed and introduced by UK architect Walter Segal in 1986. This flexible self-build system lets residents create their own designs and modify them over the years. It is an exemplar of architectural implementation of process-oriented design, which focuses on transforming the conventional route of architectural design whilst at the same time empowering passive users. After two decades of development, this method inspired the set-up of the Walter Segal Self Build Trust (WSSBT) to enable more people to build their own environments. In architectural work the best known study to investigate this question is the one carried out by Philippe Boudon (1972) about Le Corbusier’s Pessac settlement of 51 houses in the 1920‘s. As Lefebvre described the study, “. a form of enquiry to introduce material that casts a new light on the problems posed by town planning and will help us to form a general assessment covering all aspects of this discipline, which is the only profitable way of tackling and perhaps solving these problems”. As an architect, Boudon kept the study as an open enquiry rather than an assessment like POEs. He entitled the book, Lived-in Architecture: “the universal quality of ‘living’ as revealed by the day to day activities of the occupants. in the building of houses” (p.52). The main tool he used to record people’s responses were transcripts of his intensive but non-directive interviews of different stakeholders. More recently Luke Weldon Perry from UC-Berkeley conducted a survey that began in 2008 and looked at housing as a social agent of improvement and change. He described the work on his blog: “[t]he Incremental House explores various relationships between low-cost housing, architecture, and social change.looking at how architects could play a significant role in helping people improve their housing without taking away their agency”. Apart from revised Pessac, Perry went to engage residents living in Quinta Monroy, Chile; a project was developed by an architectural group ELEMENTAL in conjunction with the Chilean government. Similar to many social housing projects, their primary question was how to provide quality houses with a limited budget. Their tactic was to provide residents with a set of design rules and building guidelines that residents had to apply to half their property. They were then free to build the other half to suit their needs and any changes in their lives. Like Boudon, Perry went to conduct interviews with residents but he focused on the process of change: before and after. He created isometric drawings to show the processes by which residents build the other half of their homes over a period of time. Whilst Boudon and Perry’s studies relied on the reputation of famous architects involved with modernism’s housing projects or developments within social architecture, our very modest enquiry similarly looks at how ordinary residents have adapted, inhabited, altered their given space and unlike those studies this is an architecture of anonymity. CREATING COMMON TOOL “For architects and clients, the floor plan is a special de