Empowerment Games: Participatory Design Exercises for Sustainable Public Housing Development in the Social Context of Hong Kong

Yan Ki Lee, School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

Timothy Jachna, School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

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Abstract

Participatory Design is about involving end-users in design processes. Just as the backgrounds and social situations of users vary, there are also many different practices of Participatory Design. This project involves a customised Participatory Design process, Empowerment Games, designed through collaboration between social scientists/academics, facilitators with different backgrounds such as design and social work, and resident groups. This presentation aims at demonstrating how residents have become actively involved in an urban redevelopment program to achieve re-housing to a location near their current estate, and to formulate and express their comments and suggestions for a more appropriate future living environment.

Introduction

This project is a case study in urban community participation in Hong Kong, demonstrating how the tenants of the Lower Ngau Tau Kok (LNTK) Estate, one of Hong Kong's oldest public housing projects, have influenced the design of the new estate which they will occupy after the planned demolition of their current home. Through social actions, civic education activities and design workshops over the past three years, the participating citizens have succeeded in influencing the choice of location for their future "reception estate" and have commented on the planned estate's design brief. Their next step is to fight for a Participatory Design process of the reception estate in order to develop a sustainable and elderly-friendly community.

Background

The Lower Ngau Tau Kok Estate (LNTK) (Fig.1) was built in 1967, comprising about 4,500 households, with a combined population of 11,000. Over 30% of the residents were elderly, living either alone or as couples. The values of this locality are the distinguished social networks between the residents. They were distinguished by activeness and passion, a strong sense of community and articulate views about their needs and demands. Under the Comprehensive Redevelopment Program of the Hong Kong Housing Authority, LNTK estate was to have been demolished by 2004 and residents will be displaced to different newly-built subsidized public housing estates in Hong Kong. After two years of negotiation with many governmental departments with many protests, residents meetings and self-motivated surveys, the residents achieved their first success: a resolution that the whole community will be moved together to a nearby reception estate, rather than a site distant from their current home in year 2008.

Figure 1: The Lower Ngau Tau Kok Estate (LNTK),
1960s built public housing in Hong Kong

Project Aims

After choosing the site of their future estate, the residents wanted to know more about the design of their future home. It is at this point that they felt the need for the advice of design professional. Lee, a trained architectural designer, then joined the team and worked intensively with social workers and residential group members to define the problem and find the solution together. Working as a design researcher, Lee takes on the role of a catalyst who designed a participatory design process for this ongoing social process. 'Empowerment Games' is an action research programme in which game-like learning exercises are used to focus the attention of resident groups on how knowledge can be created and transferred through active involvement and engagement. These exercises introduce and demonstrate the concept of Participatory Design for urban-poor citizens, educate and empower residents about policy-making and design processes and help to establish working relationships with different professionals and authorities.

Project Timeline

The whole process can be divided into three phases (Fig.2): individual involvement, collective learning, and community design festival. Through the process, the power of design enhanced the existing social process, made it more powerful and influential.

Phase one: Individual Involvement

The project started with the following aims:

1. Re-house to a nearby reception location
2. Move as a whole community

The project team organised a series of social actions:

1. Set up Redevelopment Concern Groups (Oct 2000)
2. Conduct survey of resident opinions, collect over 2500 questionnaires (Feb - March 2001)
3. Residents' meetings to discuss further actions (Oct 2001)
4. Resident protests against the Housing Authority's plans for their future home (March -June 2001)
5. Meetings with authorities (May 2001)

Deliverables:
The result was that the Hong Kong Housing Authority changed their redevelopment plan so that the whole well-established community will be re-house together to a nearby reception estate.

Phase two: Collective Learning

More specific objectives are developed:

1. Participatory planning/design of the reception estate
2. Develop a sustainable and elderly friendly community

The project team worked with resident groups and introduced different participatory design exercises:

1. Visit new elderly housing (Aug-Oct 2002)
2. Visit other new estates (May-July 2003)
3. Meet Deputy Director of the Hong Kong Housing Authority to discuss design concerns (July 2003)
4. Awareness workshops with first sets of empowerment games for the concern groups (Aug 2003)
5. Briefing sessions organised by concern groups to other LNTK residents to explain the preliminary design of their reception estate (Oct-Nov 2003)

Deliverables:
Many solid recommendations about the future estate are collected and are taken into consideration by the Housing Authority.

Phase three: Community design festival (happening in the summer of 2004)

Extended objective:
This knowledge transfer exercise will extend from individual residents to resident groups members and to all residents of different generations, genders and cultural backgrounds.

Process and programme:
It will be a five-day event with different community participation activities to engage local residents in understanding the design and generating ideas for their future reception estate, through participatory design workshops for subgroups such as children, women and the elderly.

Deliverables:
A book is planned to document the whole process as an exemplar of a holistic participatory project in Hong Kong subsided housing development, and its implications for future participatory projects.

Figure 2: Timeline of the social process and
design process of the LNTK community housing project.

What are these Design Issues?

Now, all the residents will move as a whole community and remain in the local area. However, it is hard for the residents to imagine how their lives will change in the new housing estate. Most of the LNTK residents have lived at this estate since it was built in the 1960s. It was in the middle of the phase of public housing construction spanning from the 1950s to the 1970s, when "the greatest need was to provide a large number of rental housing units with basic facilities to accommodate those cleared from squatter areas, those left homeless by fires, and those with low income" [1]. Over the past forty years, the residents have tried to adapt their lives within a fixed physical environment, built to the Hong Kong 1960s public housing standard: a single room with no partition, 14-27 metres square average unit floor area for families with 4-8 persons, single slab blocks with central corridor access and 32-58 units at each level in 8-15 storeys. With improved space standards and quality of design, their future estate will have various standard units to suit different sizes of households, between from 17 to 52 metres square ranging from a one-person unit to 3-bedroom unit. This design represents the new model of Hong Kong public housing in the new millennium. Following is simple comparison between typical public housing design in Hong Kong in the 1960s and 2000s (Fig.3 and Fig.4).

Figure 3: A comparison of Hong Kong public housing
flat design - 1960s typical 4-person flat and
2000s two-bedroom flat.

Figure 4: A comparison of Hong Kong public housing layout design - (4a) the LNTK estate designed in 1967 and (4b) the new LNTK estate designed in 2004.

The main purpose of the project is to help the residents to relate their daily life experience to architects' abstract depictions of space such as drawings and models. Since their future estate has not yet been built, all the information is still in the abstract forms. It is important for the residents to understand the authorised architects' representation skill in order to participate in a discussion of the future design. A series of community workshops called 'awareness workshops' were developed to initiate a representative group of current residents of the LNTK estate, who will be the future users of the new estate, into the language of design to an extent that enables them to get involved in the design process of their future estate.

What Can Design Researcher Offer?

The workshops employed a series of game-like tools/probes called 'empowerment games' to enable participants to understand the complicated architectural design process by association with their everyday life experience. Different scales of urban living problems were tackled through different games. Association was the main method employed. The aim of these community workshops was to help the resident group members to envision the housing design and construction process. Through such new experience, knowledge of design is transferred from designer to resident group members and, through them, to other residents.

Game 1 (Fig.5) aimed at enabling participants to anticipate problems and opportunities in their future home by associating their perception of positive and negative environmental factors in several newly built housing estates in Hong Kong with issues that may possibly play a role in the design of their own future homes. The aim of this first simple awareness workshop was to provoke participants' interest in the workshops. The result was that participants were actively involved in the process and many useful dialogues about environmental issues were developed. A discussion about the design of the rubbish collection system is an example of an interesting dialogue from this game. Participants generally identified the built system as a good design but also identified opportunities for improvement.

Figure 5: Game 1 - Problem Identification and appreciation.

In awareness workshop 2, participants arranged icons representing the furniture and items of their day-to-day life within a plan of their future flat. These individual flats were then placed within the context of the overall layout of their future building block. This is game 2 (Fig.6), which allowed participants to gain an understanding of the relationship of their private space to the communal space and overall building ensemble, as well as encouraging projection of the patterns of their daily existence into the space of their future flats, leading to insights about spatial division and organisation. At the beginning, participants were confused about the concept of two-dimensional floor plans and they did not have a clear idea of the relation of plan scale to actual scale. Then they started to associate the cartooned icons with their mental maps of their existing home. After many collective conversations, all participants overcame those problems and made the game become a useful tool for them to design their future home. Many creative spatial use scenarios were developed.

Figure 6: Game 2 - Usage Association

Awareness workshop 3, tackled the most complicated issue of the project - the overall design of the estate. It is very difficult for end users to associate the tremendous scale of an entire estate with their daily experience on the basis of plans alone. Therefore, game 3 (Fig. 7) was designed based on a conceptualised construction process, intended to give the participants an understanding of the constructive logic of their future estate. Another aim of this game was to create a chance for participants to experience the transformation from two-dimensional architectural blueprint to three-dimensional conceptual model. This collective learning experience encouraged more conversations about the overall planning. Through this conceptualised process, the main aim of games 2 and 3 was to give the future users a conceptual understanding of the design of their future Housing Authority estate

Figure 7: Game 3 - 'Build our estate together'

Expectations for the Future and Discussion

Through this new experience, knowledge of design was transferred from design researcher to resident group members and to other residents. As one of the collaborators of the project, Hong Kong sociologist Dr. Ku [2] concluded: "The project is one of the pioneers in Hong Kong's housing development, which has opened the channel for the local groups to voice their view on the urban planning and renewal process of the living environment, as well as their housing preference. The findings of these projects also have enriched our greater understanding on the need of the underclass citizens and uncovered the problem of government's planning and housing policy."

Actually, this is not the conclusion but rather just the beginning of a long-term process. The participatory design process is influenced by the relationship between designers and users. Now that the users have been empowered, the next step is to involve the designers of the future housing estate in the participatory process. Empowered by their experience in the pre-participatory design exercises, the users are enable to participate as collaborators. This paper presented the personal experience of a design researcher engaged in challenging the current conventional practice of public housing design in Hong Kong and the workshops discussed in this paper were organised by the users and a design researcher without the involvement of the designers. Design empathy is a crucial element in implementing participatory design into conventional design practice, making for a more reflective design process. This empathic approach first empowered the users, and then inspired the authorised design group. The process and methods used in this project will be documented to provide an exemplar that will hopefully influence the way future public housing projects are designed in Hong Kong. The pursuit of increasing user participation in the design process implies a new, more profound role for designers as generators of processes and not merely as producers of objects.

References

[1] Yeung Y.M and Wong T.K.Y, Fifty Years of Public Housing in Hong Kong - A Golden Jubilee Review and Appraisal. The Chinese University Press. Hong Kong. 2004

[2] Chu S.F, Lee Y.K, Ku H.B and Jachna T. Empowerment Games: Community participation and sustainable public housing development in the social context of Hong Kong. In Proceedings of the International Housing Conference, the Hong Kong Housing Authority, February, 2004

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the collaborators in the community project, Ms. CHU Shuk Fan from the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui Ngau Tau Kok Community Development Centre and Dr. KU Hok Bun, Assistant Professor of the Department of Applied Social Sciences of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Special thanks to all the members of the Lower Ngau Tau Kok (II) Estate Redevelopment Concern Group and the Elderly Flats Concern Group for the active participation in the creation of the awareness workshops. All photo credits are belonged to Ms. Chu Shuk Fan and Ms. Yan Ki Lee.

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