Tastemaker: a design for life by Michael Leung

Sometimes it seems as though everyone knows Michael Leung - even the owner of a Kwun Tong dai pai dong, who chats amiably with the young designer as he sits down for lunch. "We made a 'zine about him," Leung says. "He's really proud of it."

Scratch the surface of Hong Kong's creative scene and you're bound to come across something Leung is involved in. There's Shanghai Street Studios, which runs art, design and cultural initiatives in Yau Ma Tei; HK Honey, the urban beekeeping project he founded two years ago; HK Farm, an experiment in rooftop agriculture; and 2 Years Ahead, a publishing and furniture-building project.

And that doesn't even begin to cover Leung's freelance work or his teaching at Polytechnic University's School of Design, where he will lecture on "design for the Asian lifestyle" next month.

"I think all the projects are related, so it's almost like they're the same thing," says Leung, settling into a wicker chair on the roof of the Easy-Pack Industrial Building in Kwun Tong, where he maintains an organic farm and apiary with the help of photographer Glenn Eugen Ellingesen and archivist Matthew Edmondson. "I'll do a food-safety project and I won't know whether to put it in HK Honey or HK Farm."

Leung is 28, with a shaved head, and wearing a printed T-shirt made by his friends at Start from Zero, the street art crew whose studio is just down the street.

It has been three years since Leung left his native London - where he worked as a product designer for Motorola - to study for a master of design degree at PolyU. Soon after he arrived, he realised Hong Kong was lacking in socially conscious design, so for his final project he created HK Honey, an attempt to bridge the city's rural beekeeping culture with the urban reality of most of its residents.