Workshop on Innovation and Design

On 19 November 2025, I gave a workshop on how design and technology drive circular practices. It began with one question: how many Earths would we need if everyone lived the way we do?

If everyone lived the way we do, how many Earths would we need? The slides showed the UAE at 5.8, the USA at 4.9, South Korea at 3.9 and China at 2.4. Hong Kong came in at 4.4, according to WWF Hong Kong, between the USA and South Korea. It is easy to read these numbers as someone else’s problem. This problem is close to home. Hong Kong has a peculiar relationship with the air conditioner. We chill our offices, malls and trains until we need a cardigan, then step outside and wonder why the city feels so hot. In Japan, recommended temperature for indoor comfort is set to be 23 degrees; meanwhile in Hong Kong, the A/C temperature is frequently set to 18! I’m not against comfort. But I’d think twice that a city keeping its indoors at fridge temperature in July isn’t taking its energy bill, or our climate problem, very seriously.

Then there is the weekend escape. Beaches that stayed quiet for years, mostly because they were hard to reach, now trend on social media, and the crowds follow. Visitors, from elsewhere and across the city, arrive for the photo more than the place. We travel a long way to find an untouched beach, and by arriving, we make it a touched one. Loving a place and looking after it are different things, and only one of them gets more likes.

The trouble is not awareness. It is scale. The problem feels too big for any one person to tackle, we may feel a little guilty, and then carry on. A problem this size doesn’t ask anyone to act, and that is exactly why little happens. So I start smaller, at the size of various projects around the world. What did we make? What was it made of? Where does it go next, and who decides it is waste? That last question is the mug that was thrown out for a tiny flaw, which works as well as any other mug. Circular thinking starts at home. It also starts with something small enough to finish.

Living Bridge, India

Credit: Amos Chapple

I came across this example while working on a natural history museum for the past several years. In the hills around Cherrapunji, in north-east India, the Khasi people have been growing bridges for generations. They guide the roots of rubber trees across a river and wait. The roots thicken, interlock and carry people, school children included. The roots grow, so do the reinforcement. The bridge uses little material, needs little upkeep and, as the bridge grows, it supports more the communities around the region.

I showed this bridge, as told from Julia Watson’s Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism, which gathers what is now called “Traditional Ecological Knowledge”, or TEK. The label is new to much of the design world. The knowledge is not. The Khasi did not need a name for it, or a book. But we are just slowly learning from nature once again.

In Hong Kong, many assume innovation is synonymous with technology. In reality, technology is often the most expensive answer, in money, energy, and materials. The living root bridge needed no technology at all. Even the Silk Pavilion (Neri Oxman), which did use a robotic arm, started with a better question: how can we work with silkworms instead of boiling them? Innovation begins with the question, and the tool comes after.

Afterthought: what can a teacher take from this?

I’m actually not sure what the teachers took away. Some of them teach computer science, and many work in a system where the job is to prepare students for the test. Innovation rarely appears in their timetable. A workshop about living bridges and silkworms can feel like a pleasant detour from the syllabus, and they may return to school teaching to the tests next week.

I don’t think the answer is a new lesson plan. Teachers already have too many of those. What I hoped to leave behind was a habit of asking questions, small enough to fit into a lesson they already teach. For a computer science teacher, the Silk Pavilion is not far from the syllabus. The team watched silkworm behaviour, tracked movement with sensors, tested a hypothesis, then modelled a structure. That is the same chain of steps as a coding project, applied to a living material. The I’MPERFECT mugs raise a question every programmer meets: who decides what counts as a defect? The mug works perfectly well, yet it was tossed away. A student who can argue about what counts as an error may also begin thinking about waste.

The thing I’d most like them to keep is this: Innovation in Hong Kong is often treated as new technology. The living root bridge suggests that innovation can begin by asking a better question, and a student can ask one without AI or a robot.

I don’t know whether it worked. A workshop can plant a question, but it can’t change how a school is assessed. If one teacher asks “who decides what counts as waste?” in a lesson next week, perhaps it counts as enough.