Difficulty: Summiteer (Level 3)
In 2010, the Japanese broadcaster NHK launched a children’s educational television series called Design Ah!.
The short episodes charmed viewers. They offered creative and accessible explanations of how the most ordinary things in life are cleverly designed.
Design Ah! led to an exhibition that allowed visitors to get hands-on with the ideas explained in the series.
Now, the first overseas version of the exhibition is drawing crowds at M+ museum in Hong Kong under the title “Design Ah! Experience the Wonder of Everyday Design”.
Both the TV series and the exhibitions make people go “ah!”. They take apart objects and lay out the pieces to show how they are engineered.
The exhibit features 21 stations. Nine have been localised for Hong Kong by the M+ team, whose research included going to supermarkets, stationery shops and other stores.
They took colour matchers with them so that they could identify the specific hues of everything from dim sum dishes to pedestrian crossing stripes.
The Hong Kong-specific items at the exhibition include an umbrella, a piggy bank, a pair of rubber flip-flops and a cha chaan teng plastic cup typically used to serve tea.
