Abstract
Designers nowadays consider themselves as the only experts to have conceptualized the everyday practice of the ordinary. They deal with design at a fantastic pace, with the aim of satisfying “public interest” instead of designing for individual users. For instance, with the reclaimed area of Hong Kong, which has been transformed into a public space dedicated to facilitate the vibrant transformation of Hong Kong into a world city, the government constantly set up strategies assuming a standardized user practice in order to achieve legislative approval for the project. Actually, the processes of conceptualization and standardization may not sufficiently summarize the specifications of everyday life. In other words, current ways of design based on public interest do not always meet what users actually want and need, since these design methods tend to identify all users as “average people” within standard dimensions. Nevertheless, what we are given every day is an everyday life that is not “banal and meaningless.” The acts of city users cannot be defined merely as mechanical or according to a stereotype. Although users’ reactions or responses to their living environments have been changed gradually with the urban transformation, their behaviours are not simply passive reactions or responses to space, but a kind of active reception in the creative acts or art performed by city users in the space. This research mainly elaborates on the “reception of space” in order to inspire design generations without a designer, and bring designers, planners, administrators, and government a perspective of user-oriented design. It includes an empirical study with intensive observations and direct interviews in Wan Chai North and South to review the importance of considering everyday life in design, based on users’ tactical and creative receptions of public living environments. The study then redefines the role of city users in the urban spaces in which they practice and exercise, and argues that users of urban space require that designs be more inclusive.
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Huang, Y., Siu, K.W.M. (2013). Reception of Space: Inspiring Design without a Designer. In: Rau, P.L.P. (eds) Cross-Cultural Design. Methods, Practice, and Case Studies. CCD 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8023. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39143-9_44
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