Parallel Labs are Caroline Wuthrich and Geraldine Borio, working on urban strategies, architectural projects, interior design and art installations

When discovering a new place we often rely on our five senses to capture a direct knowledge about the environment. Through sight, touch, smell, taste and hearing we observe, analyze and evaluate the surroundings through the filter of our culture and education for slowly appropriating the place.

The excitement we get from this experience is usually very different from our daily life practice. Our habits are taking over our sensitivity and creating a distance between our body and the context we are familiar with.

For this workshop Parallel Lab suggests to benefit from the sensorial awareness you will have as a foreigner in order to extract and re-intensify some aspects of the Hong Kong people‘s daily life.

For that your five senses will guide you in the discovery of North Point‘s neighborhood, an area representative of the extreme city‘s congestion, where people and morphology are closely tied together.

We will then use the urban voids as a „sensorial boxes“ and develop tools/instruments to intensify the perception and usage of a place. By disturbing, exaggerating, diverting the users‘ daily life practice, we will explore with these installations the impact senses have on the behavior of people.

– expected outcome: sensorial installation in urban space/ design of a sensorial instrument (product design).
– previous knowledge: good skills in small scale construction work/ object making
– equipment needed …: no need everything can be buy/borrow in Hong Kong