Design by Users - In Search of Indigenous Creativity & Wisdom from Designing Tools Exhibition
Function Place,
Hong Kong Heritage Museum
22 October 2005 - 14 November 2005
 
Co-organized with Community Museum Project


Many people in different industries have invented or customized tools to cater to their own individual needs. These creative inventions have often aimed not only to speed up productivity, but also to improve the quality of life. However, many of them have not been recorded, while many more have even been overlooked or neglected in what can be called a dormant stream of design history.


In a series of workshops co-organized by the Hong Kong Heritage Museum and the Community Museum Project over the past several months, participants have rediscovered the indigenous creativity and wisdom that comes from inventing different kinds of tools and then gone on to explore the close relationship between design and life. In this exhibition that provides a fitting conclusion to the programme, a number of case studies are showcased that involve interesting tools that have been assembled using discarded objects or constructed as alternative tools or as supplements to existing tools. They have been collected from a variety of sites, including hardware stores, dai pai dong (open-air food stalls), schools and dwellings. Though from a traditional design viewpoint these tools may seem crude and unsophisticated, the indigenous creativity and the usefulness they embody should undoubtedly be recognized. We hope that, through the exhibition, a new approach to thinking about design and life can also be explored.


 
Exhibit Highlights





Other Past Exhibitions