Design thats worth a detour

Disu Dang

If you appreciate good design, you should not miss deTour. Conceived in 2004 to run concurrently with the Business of Design Week, Hong Kong's largest design festival has become an annual program showing the city as an international creative hub and featuring inspiring designs from young and emerging creative talent.

With the slogan of "Design as One," deTour 2022 is made up of more than 80 activities, including 19 participatory installations and exhibitions, 40 workshop sessions, 12 design dialogues, 12 guided tours, two film screenings and one virtual festival in the lineup.

It also has an immersive tour in which visitors can take part in the design process.

"As one of the most exciting and prolific design festivals in Hong Kong, we're really excited to present Design as One this year, inviting participatory designs to the audience and using their participation to reflect what is going on in the city and different parts of the world," said festival curator Shin Wong.

The activities are divided into three main exhibition categories: International Collaboration, Feature Exhibitions and Selected Entries.

In the International Collaboration category, it's all About Time. Created by Domestic Data Streamers, a team of designers, the two installation pieces question our perception of time.

One is a big paper clock divided into 10 parts, each indicating an answer for a time-related question - such as "what does time mean to you?" Visitors can make marks on the paper to answer the question.

The second installation is a giant board with two sheets of paper connected with printers, which can be controlled by visitors to print out either "a time to remember" or "a time to forget."

"Our relationship with time is complex - it talks about our culture and character, and defines who we are and how we act," said a designer from Domestic Data Streamers.

Another exhibit, Unlearn / Relearn\, in the Feature Exhibitions category takes a close look at Chinese characters.

Breaking traditional Chinese characters into unrecognizable parts and attaching them with designated sounds, designer Vanissa Law aims to make her viewers examine their understanding of the characters they use every day.

The exhibit challenges people to step back and detach from the entrenched understanding of how language works by changing the structure of language, and presenting an alternative way to experience rebuilding words with sound.

In the Selected Entries category, designer Anthony Ko draws attention to another familiar element in the city: glowing signboards.

Signboards are rapidly vanishing from the streets of Hong Kong due to a new regulation which regards most as illegal structures.

To re-examine signboards' historic, cultural and aesthetic values, Ko started the After Seventeen Days project, which proposes a signboard evaluation system similar to the evaluation of historic buildings to determine which signboards should stay or go based on a set of criteria.

A field of 17 signboards hung in the streets around Hong Kong will be enacted in a dark room. During the exhibition period, one signboard will be selected daily for evaluation.

To record visitors' preferences, there will be a physical "keep-or-trash" button on-site as well as an online questionnaire.

Said Ko: "When visitors enter the darkroom with all the signboards, we want them to feel like they are really inside the city and passively affected by what other people do with the button outside. This way, they can have an immersive experience of what's going on in the city."

At the finale of deTour 2022, After Seventeen Days will visualize the public's views on signboard culture and the subject's perceived value to the city.

DeTour's other exhibitions focuse on a wide range of subjects - from consumerism and animal protection to gender expressions - providing a chance for the public to reflect on the issues and make take part themselves.

The deTour design festival is open to the public at PMQ in Central until Sunday.