Uniting stakeholders and facilitating collaboration to deliver great impact for the Tung Chung community

Collaboration is in our DNA at MAKE, and we enjoy partnering with teams across the world to MAKE change happen through our expertise in Design Thinking. This is especially true when the collaboration is to help people or the planet.

We collaborated with the Hong Kong Council of Social Service (HKCSS) for phase III of the ‘Building Community, Building Tung Chung,’ programme to help design the future of a thriving and multicultural area in Hong Kong. 

Together, we wanted to MAKE full use of our combined team’s skills and the community’s insights, wants and needs to affect real change and align this community building programme behind key focus areas for Phase III.

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With the needs of the Tung Chung community at the heart of our approach, we used a combination of Design Thinking and Service Design techniques to help HKCSS bring the community and attendees on an innovation journey through storytelling and co-design. We designed and delivered an outstanding Cantonese workshop to pave the way forward for Phase III of the programme by growing empathy, sparking new ideas and reflecting on prior phases.

As part of our solutions we adopted a ‘Rose, Thorn, Bud’ technique to capture participants' positive response (rose), areas for improvement (thorns), and opportunities (bud) to facilitate reflection and ideation.

We used insight cards to distill and share key community experiences, enabling participants to gain a deeper understanding of the needs of Tung Chung residents. By employing a ‘How might we?’ approach, we framed opportunities as prompts for participants to creatively problem solve through ideation. 

A system of dot voting allowed participants to prioritize ideas collectively, highlighting the most promising concepts for further exploration. And finally, we adopted an impact/effort prioritization model, to help teams identify the highest-impact ideas that could be considered for Phase III of the programme, maximizing outcomes of the important initiative.

Our collaboration with Hong Kong Council of Social Service saw the effective engagement of stakeholders across Tung Chung, bridging sponsors, businesses, not-for-profits, a district councilor and community members to uncover viewpoints and create fresh dialogues. Together we gained a greater understanding of the Tung Chung  community and how all levels can work together for the future.

Our approach to collaboration instilled a sense of shared ownership and excitement amongst the community, sponsors and HKCSS, achieving our vision for a long-term, sustainable set of focus areas for Phase III and beyond.

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