OPEN EVERYTHING#1: SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE

 

How can design actions open new platforms for people to co-create customised local solutions for sustainable development? Spring is the start for new beginnings. In the coming year, HKDI DESIS Lab will hold a couple of open design events in the series “Open Everything”. For our first OPEN event, we invited inventor and social entrepreneur Cesar Harada to conduct an Open/Social Architecture co-creation experience. Cesar is a Senior TED Fellow who quit his job at MIT and moved to the Gulf to develop an Open Source robot called ‘Protei’ to clean up the BP oil spill, and has now settled in Hong Kong. During two beautiful Sunday mornings, more than 40 citizens and HKDI students gathered together at HKDILWL’s Design Boulevard. At first Cesar led the group to experience different forms of networking. The participants were asked to reflect on the experience in different networks until they came up with a final collective form. Out of this new ‘network,’ they used just plastic pipes to build a simple but interesting structure. The experience was aimed at exploring the possible forms of structure that can evolve from social networks created by participants. It asks the question of whether social networks can generate our next architecture.​