With a uniquely diverse cultural and urban landscape, how to realise Hong Kong’s collective potentials in the design and planning of public spaces, and redefine the re-creational through co-creation?

‘Digital Common(s)’ is an intergenerational design research project that brings a combination of metaverse technologies - community gamification and immersive digital twins - to public housing residents as design communication tools. Through a series of workshops that invite citizens, designers, and public actors to become co-researchers, the project aims to facilitate common stewardship of data, information, and technology, which are valuable resources in collective decision-making. It works with local community centres to be implemented on a continuing basis - interdisciplinarily between social workers and designers; intergenerationally amongst youth and older adults. The diversity of backgrounds highlights the added value of co-operative design technologies in transcending needs, knowledge, and the everyday wisdom for shaping a shared expression in a spatial language.

The outcome bridges the ‘in-betweens’ - physical and digital, top-down and bottom up, designers and users - and challenges high-density cities to co-design with participatory and situated thinking. By enhancing digital inclusivity, the project demonstrates how citizens may be served, not merely as passive data subjects, but active contributors in knowledge production - a form of citizen design science.