How can design encourage us to pause, notice, and ponder the subtle imperfections we so easily overlook in everyday life?
Instead of erasing every flaw, design invites us to embrace imperfect conditions and elevate them into something meaningful. As micro-architecture, furniture condenses spatial thinking to focus intimately on human connection. Acting as a lens, design helps us tune into overlooked urban spaces and social dynamics, while illuminating our daily lives through thoughtful, uplifting interventions.
Moderated by PolyU lecturer Kam-Fai Chan, this dialogue brings together deTour 2026 co-creators HONMI and Canalside Studio to unpack the core concepts behind their works. Their designs seamlessly blend playfulness, materiality, and flexible systems—from reimagining annoying street air-conditioner drips into a cooling mist installation, to transforming industrial bearings into tactile, rolling playful benches. Join us to explore how design bridges daily living with cultural values—and how, in a fast-moving city, a little design “+1” makes life better, not perfect.
Canalside Studio is a design practice that finds curiosity in architecture, interiors, installation art, furniture, and products. We approach design through questioning and an open perspective, identifying practical constraints to distil each subject’s essence into a physical experience.
Co-founded in 2021 by Etain Ho and Francis Lam, the practice has received multiple awards, including the Gold Award at the Taipei International Design Award, Japan’s Good Design Award, the Golden Pin Design Award, the Hong Kong Smart Design Award, and recognition as one of Guangzhou Design Week’s Regional Top 10 Designers in 2023. Works by the co-founders have been featured in international media and publications, including Tatler Asia, SCMP PostMag, Dezeen, Detail, Designboom, ArchDaily, and AD Clever.
HONMI is a Hong Kong and New York-based studio founded in 2025, working across art, architecture, and cultural programming. The studio treats design as a method of facilitation, cultivating new collaborations between creative practitioners, institutions, and local communities. Its work spans furniture, installations, pavilions, and architecture, testing how colour, programme, and materiality shape collective experience. HONMI also organises POSITIONS, a platform that redefines the storefront as cultural infrastructure, transforming commercial retail spaces into sites for gathering, exchange, and public engagement.
Bryan Honting Wong is a co-founder of HONMI; he received an SMArchS from MIT Architecture and holds a BALS from HKU Architecture. Namhi Kwun, also a co-founder of HONMI, holds a dual SMArchS and MCP from MIT Architecture, alongside a BArch from CCA. Kaming Lee is a graphic designer who earned an MFA in Graphic Design from the Yale School of Art and holds a BFA from CCA.