All Things Circular

Bringing a Dutch Design Week Show Home

In September 2025, the show we first made for Dutch Design Week came home to Hong Kong. All Things Circular: Hong Kong Designers’ Circular Innovation ran from 8 September to 24 November 2025 at the Design Museum in DX design hub, Sham Shui Po. It was organised by Hong Kong Design Centre with the Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Hong Kong and Macao. I co-curated it with HKDC.

It was the return of ((Capsule)) Hong Kong Design Showcase, which we presented in Eindhoven in 2023. At home it sat beside a companion show, Designing Circularity, which pairs Dutch and Hong Kong designers.

What it shows

Circular design means keeping materials in use instead of throwing them away. In Hong Kong, it often grows out of necessity. The show looks at how designers turn waste into value and put human needs first. The projects range from biodegradable sugarcane packaging to ceramic glazes made from joss paper ash, fashion made from fruit peel, and work that improves life for older people and people with visual impairments.

Afterthought: one show, two ways of building it

For Eindhoven, we coordinated with another party who had already hired a Dutch fabricator to supply rental frames. This had clear advantages. The frames could be returned and reused, which suits an exhibition about circularity, and nothing had to be shipped across Europe. It also had a cost. The choice of materials was limited, and we could only work with what was available. For a show that runs for about a week, we accepted that.

In Hong Kong, we could source materials locally. We built the showcases from recyclable wood, with cardboard as the base, again aiming to leave as little impact as possible. With more control over the materials, we could design flexible layouts and rearrange the displays to suit the space. The experience convinced me that a circular exhibition needs more than reusable parts. It needs materials from nearby and a design that can change shape.

What happens after the show

Even so, choosing a good material does not settle what happens next. A material can be recyclable and still never be recycled. “Recyclable” says what a material could do. “Recycled” says what actually happened to it.

In my experience, Hong Kong lacks the facilities to turn dismantled exhibition materials back into raw material, and fabricators, who work to tight deadlines and budgets, rarely have a reason to chase that. Some bring in mainland Chinese manufacturers for the work, and once the show is taken down, much of the material still ends up in landfill.

The wider picture is the same. In 2024, Hong Kong sent about 10,500 tonnes of waste from homes and businesses to landfill every day, and recovered 34% of what it produced, according to the Environmental Protection Department.

This is how greenwashing happens: a project uses the word “circular” without doing the work. I know of projects like that. I ask three questions. Where did the material come from? Where does it go after the show? Who is responsible for taking it back?

I don’t claim my own shows solve this. A single exhibition can only go so far, and being honest about that is where I‘d like to start.