Text by: Angus Chan (Lab Fellows)
Social Lab: An Evolving Social Innovation
The finale of “Healthy Street Lab” is finally over. I am fortunate to participate in the Hong Kong’s first community-initiated social innovation laboratory, once again. At this moment, it is a good time to look backward for how far I have come and what I have observed in the two Social Labs, from this time the “Healthy Street Lab” back to the last time “Park Lab”.
As Margaret Mead, an American anthropologist, suggested,
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Like most of the general in Hong Kong, I personally haven’t had much understanding on how it can be happened before joining Social Lab. It is because the traditional top-down approach is the resort dominated by the authorities to fix things up when it comes to addressing our social issues in Hong Kong. Social innovation initiated in public domain is gaining popularities around the world while it is still a completely new and unfamiliar topic locally. The launch of Social Lab by the MaD in this sense helps to form a new space for tackling social issues with empathetic, inclusive and creative perspectives in a very local context with the bottom-up concept.
Thinking retrospectively after a year I experienced in Social Labs, I would like to highlight some unique and valuable elements from Social Lab. First, the formation of Social Lab allows openness and inclusiveness of different voices and opinions from different perspectives. In the Healthy Street Lab, a multiplicity of participants, including locals in the community, industrial professionals and civil servants from related department (Transport Department), can co-design, work and learn together for a single but remarkable social issue that to create a walkable environment in Sham Shui Po. Social Lab provides an occasion connecting and bonding different stakeholders from different sectors, and hence encourages an open attitude to appreciate different points of view. It is very important and notable that stories of the locals from the community can be revealed and demonstrated to the related civil servants during the process of addressing the local issues in the Lab when their voices are always treated as the non-professional one and neglected in authorities’ dialogue.
Second, Social Lab offers small-scale exemplars for large-scale problems. In the Healthy Street Lab, Sham Shui Po is chosen as the field of experiment for study of walkable street environment under the consideration of practicality. As Sham Shui Po is one of the local communities with high population density, outcomes from our experiments carried out in the area, including the researches, observations and policy recommendations, would be significant to offer some considerable ideas and references for Hong Kong in an extensive scale. The Lab offers spaces for working on something appear to be unthinkable in the authorities’ perspective.
Lastly, the model of Social Lab is developing and improving with the empowerment of every evaluation. The evolution of Social Lab can be seen with the fine-tuned methodologies, smooth operations and improved facilitations when the two Social Labs are in comparison. Technical tweaks resulted from feedbacks on size of participants, duration for the Lab and interval of each session help to accelerate the evolution of the local Social Lab. The greater availability of “trial-and-error” and comments from the previous Social Labs enable the better learning itself and greater capabilities of Social Lab, contributing the future success of the next time Social Lab.
The ever-growing social issues with the increasing disbelief casted on the authorities suggests the needs of larger-scale, longer-duration and more Social Labs over different neighborhoods in our communities. As Paul Adams said,
“The most important factor was not whether there were influential people but whether there was a critical mass of easily influence people who were connected to other people who were was to influence. When this critical mass of connected people didn’t exist, not even the most influential people could get an idea to spread widely.”
I believe taking our first step on engaging in Social Lab would be important towards reversing the nowadays top-down mind-sets, transforming conditions of “people-disconnected” practices, and then achieving an empathetic, inclusive, creative and livable city of Hong Kong in the future.
