She’s bringing community back to Hong Kong through designing micro-parks: meet Marisa Yiu

Design Trust Futures Studio has dotted micro-parks across Hong Kong with one goal in mind: creating communities. We meet Marisa Yiu, its tireless champion

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Marisa Yiu, Design Trust co-founder, at Hamilton Street Rest Garden, in Yau Tsim Mong in Hong Kong. Design Trust Futures Studio has dotted micro-parks across Hong Kong with one goal in mind: creating communities. Photo: Design Trust

Fionnuala McHugh

Published: 11:15am, 3 Dec 2023

One September evening in 2019, Marisa Yiu Kar-san, co-founder and executive director of Design Trust, opened an exhibition at Haw Par Mansion in Tai Hang on Hong Kong Island.

“Heritage is Innovation” was an initiative of Design Trust Futures Studio (DTFS), a flagship programme she’d established in 2017 to bring together experienced designers and newer talents.

The 1936 building, about to be reborn as a music school, provided a perfect catalyst: history married to 21st century innovation.

Yiu was at the heart of the project. Her fingernails that autumn night in 2019 were painted the same neon green as the brochure.

The Dancing Phoenix rug, seen here at Haw Par Mansion, is heat-sensitive carpet. Photo: Design Trust

“It’s such an extremely hopeful and optimistic moment for such a vibrant community to come together,” she said. The pro-democracy protests were already well under way but Yiu is a glass-half-full personality.

When she remarked, on a tour of the grade-one-listed historic building, “There are always unexpected moments,” she was referring to the objects (textiles with acoustic possibilities, scent diffusers, movable sculptures, a heat-sensitive carpet of many colours) tucked into the mansion’s corners.