This text is an artistic companion to the accompanying collages where complexity, ambiguity, emergence, and abstraction are emphasised. Through artistic practice I investigate the primacy of objects and their relations. Consistent with Barad’s Agential Realism, objects are constructed through their relations. This conflicts with a capitalist and colonialist view where objects pre-exist relations and are that which can be extracted, used and/or consumed. The images herein are composed from fragments of photographs taken at a particle accelerator facility where fragment boundaries are constructed by a machine learning algorithm. Images are composed by placing fragments according to their relationships using a second machine learning algorithm that emphasises some boundaries and dissolves others. These layers of boundary-making are analogous to cognitive processes where the objects of thought are proxies for complex relations. This is the crux of our contemporary era; social and material complexity cause us to attend to objects at the detriment of the systems that allows those objects to be.

SloMoVo is mostly inaudible voice/grunts/hums triggering synths generated in real-time. It is throat synthing: making silence into sound. Each word makes a mountain. Each breath begins a tide. SloMoVo asks: how do tiny seemingly inconsequential gestures of our lives reverberate through networks? How potent is the seemingly impotent unheard voice when augmented with tech? What effect does the unheard or repressed or invisible have on the resonance of the universe? Is network technology and media software capable of expanding identity? What is the resonant frequency of society?

Olivia Chen has conducted research into the transient dawn markets of Hong Kong in which hawkers secretly operate second-hand markets, forming a liminal space in which objects of inconsequential value are sold and exchanged. Through this Chen has built an understanding of the web of the social relations and hierarchies that underpin poorer areas in Hong Kong, exposing the socio-economic disparities in Bulkeley Street, Hung Hom and giving the lie to the prosperous facade of Hong Kong. The reality that she captures is a vanishing one, with street markets giving way to shopping malls. Through protracted observation, Chen has found that such markets contribute to the recycling and exchange mechanisms of a material economy of the city, and that such spaces of production build social cohesion through weaving webs of social connections. As a wish to manifest these social webs, Chen’s work The Bulkeley Market explores storytelling as a spatial practice in ways that highlight the importance of such issues in the production of social space.

An investigation into illustrations of philosophical texts conducted by artist Barbara Ellmerer and graphic designer Vera Kaspar, two artists who documented their enquiries with ‘image protocols’. These protocols, in turn, led to a re-evaluation of the materials and means used in the process of artistic perception and production. This process remains structurally resistant to verbalisation but relies on individual calibrations between the perception of a given image and the means and materialities at the artist’s disposal (colours, brushes, paper, but also photography, scanning, printing).

This paper explores how Peer-to-Peer learning can level-up students' understanding of computer-aided design (CAD) with Autodesk Auto- CAD programme for Interior Design Year 1 students. As students come from different knowledge backgrounds, they approach the module with different understanding levels, with the weaker students unable to follow the live demonstration tutorials. A peer tutoring assignment using a student-led peer-to-peer learning pedagogy, was introduced to advance students' understanding and internalise content better by reinforcing their learning. Each group has an equal proportion of students with different levels of knowledge and capabilities, and each group member conducted self-research on a topic segment, shared their knowledge and findings within their group, and thereafter curated a 15-minute lecture and facilitation workshop for peers. Tutors provided consultation and mediation, encouraging students’ participation. The assignment’s results showed that the peer-to-peer learning approach efficaciously empowered students and motivated learning, enabling them to be self-directed learners.

This paper provides an argument against understanding risk-taking in design education as something ideally in need of only being calculable and formalisable. Using the German sociologist Ulrich Beck’s theory on risktaking combined with the current discourse on design thinking, together with an analysis of a three week-long interdisciplinary design workshop, we analyse and discuss how risk-taking - as a general concept - in design education is an inherent element of the education itself. We argue, however, non-calculable risks, like human-centred design concerns, like desirability of use, ethics of technology, are an equally important part of a modern-day educational skillset as calculable risks. The aim is arguing for the prospect of interdisciplinary design-based education models as one way of embracing the non-calculable elements of a problem space.

This photo essay explores the possibility of radically shifting the understanding of the design studio as a spatial construct. By considering the seven-year evolution of a (socalled) design-build project known as the Imizamo Yethu Water Platforms, it recognises the possibility of dislocating the design studio from its traditionally centralised space in the academy and moving it to the site of its investigation or intervention for the duration of a project. The Imizamo Yethu Water Platforms aimed to improve water and sanitation infrastructure in a severely under-resourced informal settlement in Cape Town, South Africa, through the insertion of small permanent public spaces. Due to a number of reasons, including the physical characteristics of the sites selected for these spaces, the design studio gradually shifted its physical location to such an extent that virtually the entire design, documentation and construction process took place in-situ.

Different from the conventional design-built projects, the service-learning educational model represents a student led community driven education process. This photos essay delivers evidence, spanning 15 years and various contexts, demonstrating the impact of service learning and its dependency on cross-disciplinary skills. Beyond the social value, service learning fosters a series of interpersonal and professional relationships, amplifying skills and education value outside of the classroom.

This report is about an explorative co-crafting course applying the notion of recursive publics to adult learning and pro-environmental activation, which aimed to engage a diverse cohort of learners towards patterns of eating, living, and engaging that promoted wellbeing and a healthy environment. This two-month-long, university-endorsed study in Hong Kong saw 22 participants fermenting their urine in which to grow an edible plant (Lactuca sativa), thereby creating a material relationship between their bodies and the environment. Technologies were employed to bring people physically together for greater emancipatory engagement inside the shared material condition. When analyzed, these technologies revealed their potential for opening or restricting the synergies from combined purpose, expertise, and immanent life processes in recursively profound and playful ways. This civic-tech study offers a recursive self-implication approach to design education as a collective negotiation process for navigating unknown territory to converge a myriad of expertise and intended beneficiaries.

Since 2016 the Environmental and Interior Design Programme (E&I), School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, has implemented an educational model called the vertical studio. Until now, the vertical studio model has become an instrumental peer-to-peer learning scheme while enhancing students' competency in digital literacy. A first of its kind within the design education context of Asia, the vertical studio model has contributed to advance design education practices, embracing collaborative learning opportunities, and facilitate knowledge and skills transfer of drawing techniques, technology, and digital proficiency.