Networked Urbanism

design thinking initiatives for a better urban life

Design critics: Belinda Tato and Jose Luis Vallejo, principals of Ecosistema Urbano

This workshop, under the title of “Designing human cities for the digital age”, aims to provide an alternative to the traditional approach of designing urban environments from a bird’s-eye view, and a single designer’s perspective.

Networked Urbanism not only examines the physical dimension of the city, but also its social processes and fluxes, made visible through the digital layer, developing initiatives that generate spontaneous transformations and set up conditions for change.

This video is about inconvenient for the disable and we are focus on the blind spot of the transportation. As we found that some of the universal design in Hong Kong are not up to the standard. The disabled are hard to use it such as visually impaired. In addition, we wish people could put myself in others’ shoes to experience how uncomfortable that people using the wrong design facilities. We would like to use the first person role to reveal the feeling of them. Besides, would like to ask the public or government to show solicitude for them too.


We have selected the public space in the ground level which linking the Tseung Kwan O mtr station and the Popcorn. Most of the people just walked past the park and not willing to use the benches. After interviewing with those local people, we found that they do not really like the place due to several reasons but mainly too expose there is nothing to do. In turn, the public space is only served for circulation use.

When we think deeply, many public open space in Hong Kong are in the same situation. They do not fulfill the public’s needs. We believe the public space is for the public and there could be so many possibilities in the area. Therefore, in this video, we hope the people could share their thought and express what they really want, being a part of creating their place and eventually gets a healthier and better city.


We found a unreasonable issue. The park is built for encouraging people to ride bicycles. But why we cannot cycle outside the indoor bicycle stadium in that park? Although there is a bicycle path surrounded the park, cycling is not allowed inside. It provide a lot of inconvenience to the bicyle users.

Now, we are focusing on that park, Tsueng Kwun O City Town Park.

We went to the site and start to observe the users. We found that although there is a large signage asking not to cycle, no one follow the rule. So, is the signage useful? The video is to tease the useless of the signage and help people to reflect. We use a funny way to create a story and use some extreme methods to follow the instruction of the signage.

 

 


workshop – HD 720pThis video is about inconvenient for the disable and we are focus on the blind spot of the transportation. As we found that some of the universal design in Hong Kong are not up to the standard. The disabled are hard to use it such as visually impaired. In addition, we wish people could put myself in others’ shoes to experience how uncomfortable that people using the wrong design facilities. We would like to use the first person role to reveal the feeling of them. Besides, would like to ask the public or government to show solicitude for them too.

 

Please enjoy!

http://youtu.be/Fg9fkqHT6xs


This video is about a citizen who sit in a park. However, the park is surrounded by schools and built nearly the road which is very busy and disturbing by the noise.
The citizen in the video cannot stay no longer in the park. He leaf and the park become unfrequented.

However, after building a lawn and planting plants, the trees block the noise from schools and road. Also, the trees can purify the air and increase the air quality. After the improvement, the park become vibrant and attracted more citizens to visit. Finally, the citizens in the video all enjoy the park.

After the video shooting, we found that a good planting design is important for the park. A designer should consider the surrounding area for the planting design to achieve ‘People, Tree, Harmony’.


After we site visit and interview with user, we find out the park miss one important thing, Fun! We have an ideas about add more fun in park. It have been a playground for child , it is a fun facility for performance or action. People can have interact with another and the park.


Title: What to do if no fish at waterfront park?

Reflection: The people-oriented design tends to be a public space problem, such as at TKO waterfront park, it allows people fishing but there is no local fish in the river, in fact, the fish is come from some Chinese religious cermonies: people buy fish from supermarket and release them back into wild river for getting good luck by giving them new life. An amateur fishman told us he recognizes the fish at waterfront park was come from supermarket as they all in the same size and same type, and he claimed that he used to see some people release the fish on the boat several times. In short, our reflection is we should see bigger and design our public space from greater perspective instead of focusing on human use only.

Action: Raise the public awareness about the balancing of ecology-oriented design and people-oriented design. Collecting more strange environmental phenomenon in pulic space is one of the possible way to encourage the designers concern more about the design of taking care of organisms from sky to sea instead of human only. For example, design some nests for birds or shelters for fish would be a good idea to improve our public space design. If no fish at waterfront park, beside importing fish into the river, we also need landscape architects to design the local ecology for the sustainable development of our city.

 

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This video is about using dog poops as a fertilizer which added to the planter, increasing greening area that based on the existing fences at Wan Po Road Pet Garden.

This is a popular pet garden and pet garden has to separated by fences for safety reasons. It can keeps the owners stay with their dogs, and separates the road and garden. But the fences is designed like a jail and make people stressful.

So we design some planters that placed below the fences, and the plants can climb up the fences that work similar to vertical greening. The planter is designed like a flatten excrement collection box thus it can blocks the smell of the poops, so when people carry up the poops, they can put those into the planter then used as fertilizer which benefits to the plants.

So finally, we come up with a way that make dog poops become a useful fertilizer and make the pet garden greener.


This workshop, under the title of “Designing human cities for the digital age”, aims to provide an alternative to the traditional approach of designing urban environments from a bird’s-eye view, and a single designer’s perspective. #networkedurbanism not only examines the physical dimension of the city, but also its social processes and fluxes, made visible through the digital layer, developing initiatives that generate spontaneous transformations and set up conditions for change.

Students will make intensive use of ditial tools and media to find opportunities of improving public spaces around Hong Kong, to define proposals for a better urban life, and to broadcast their message in the most effective way.


networkedurbanism.com is a platform for sharing knowledge and design thinking experiences with the world around us, breaking through the walls of academia in an attempt to improve the society in which we live.