Four city trams given a makeover as designers celebrate a Hong Kong icon
Ticket For its fifth anniversary, design series Detour takes it to the streets with a celebration of Hong Kong's trams, writes Charley Lanyon
Interior designer Linny Sze Ling-lee has lived on Hong Kong Island for 25 years and made use of trams nearly every day. So when she was asked to take a photo of an interesting city sight for her final-year project at Polytechnic University four years ago, she snapped the tram tracks in Wan Chai. That photo, which she still keeps on her phone, has since inspired an ambitious public design project that finally came to fruition last Friday when four customised trams rolled out on the tracks.
Sze's trams are the centrepiece of Detour, an annual series of programmes showcasing original ideas from young creative designers from Hong Kong and abroad. Organised in parallel with the Business of Design Week, Detour, which runs until Sunday, previously transformed disused historical sites into a showcase for cutting-edge design. This year, to mark the fifth anniversary of the Detour festival, organisers Hong Kong Ambassadors of Design decided to take, pardon the pun, a different route.
These trams are almost like mobile performances for the city
"In the past few years we made good use of a historical building or complex but this year we wanted to do something different," says Sze, a member of the curatorial team.
Hong Kong trams formed a cutting-edge system when they were launched in 1902; at a time when most of the world's tram systems were powered by steam or pulled by horses, Hong Kong's was fully electric. The largest exclusively double decker tram system on earth, the ding dings, as local trams are affectionately known, have proved a powerful tourist draw as well as an inexpensive form of transport, carrying about 230,000 passengers daily along its 30 kilometres of tracks. They have run mostly unchanged for more than a century.
But more than simply present the tram as a means of transport or a symbol of historic Hong Kong, Detour project director Alvin Yip views their tram programmes as an opportunity to show how good design can affect people's lives. "It's not just how we use it but how it looks, how it relates to the city as a whole."
Building on Sze's graduation exercise which explored the potential of the tram as a moving space that engages with the culture of places along its route, the four trams customised for Detour act as transport and as exhibitions in their own right.
Different teams of designers were brought in create a specific immersive experience - educational, meditative, musical and culinary - and the public can get tickets for the ride that piques their interest.