Vivian Wong

illustration chinese new year celebrations

Vivian was born and raised in Hong Kong, with experiences working in architectural and design practices in both London and Hong Kong. She completed her Part 1 at the University of Edinburgh with a Masters of Arts with Honours in Architecture. Now as a Part 2 graduate, she hopes to expand her experience and knowledge in architecture by initiating cross-disciplinary collaborations with other fields such as graphic design, animation, illustration and contemporary art. In Vivian’s free time, she enjoys creating colourful illustrations and a world of characters and fun adventures and sharing them on Instagram.

Illustration chinese painting people eating

In response to the systemic social divisions present in Beijing, my project aims to challenge the top-down monumentality of Beijing’s urban fabric. My project proposes a series of design interventions generated through gameplay allowing for greater agency and belonging to citizens of any status.

My design intervention is an engine for spontaneous urban actions that wouldn’t normally happen in the current city dynamics. As a methodology, I have been using a traditional Chinese board game as my design tool, and I have assigned five main characters who hold fundamental roles in the city. The board game is based on the traditional Chinese game called Airplane Chess where the aim of the game is for characters to reach the center. The game mechanism engineers productive collaborations between these characters, prompting unconventional social interactions, which would enable each encounter to produce spontaneous interventions. The result is the production of new civic spaces and reconfiguring of the known narratives of historical and cultural events, monuments, and landmarks in Beijing.

The project will be framed in snapshots of 5 interventions spanning across 5 moments in time throughout the year. Thus, over the course of a year, several events would happen in Beijing to create a Festival City designed to enable drifters to come into the city center and interact with others and the city itself.

Brief 1: Djinn – The body of research initially stems from a personal standpoint. Having grown up in different countries and studied in international schools, the people around me have come from all walks of life with numerous various cultural backgrounds.

Brief 1: Djinn – A third culture kid may also be viewed as a traveller. A traveller’s home is constructed through snapshots of memories and glimpses of landscapes. A traveller’s space is an archetype of a non-place.

Through the use of ludic interventions, the spatial propositions will be generated through gameplay where my project challenges and up-ends the top-down monumentality of Beijing’s urban fabric, allowing for greater agency and belonging to citizens of any status. My design intervention is an engine for spontaneous urban actions that wouldn’t normally happen in the current city dynamics. As a methodology, I have been using a traditional Chinese board game as my design tool.

board-games game-design games

Boardgame Characters – Each of the five characters I have created represents a different ‘level’ of status, hierarchy, and agency.

beijing board-games character-design games

Beijing City Center Site Plan – This project will focus on Sanmao as the main character and their collision with the other 4 characters, particularly in locations in the city that hold significant political and cultural undertones. The nature of the collisions between the characters, the location of the encounter, and thus the design proposal responds to a calendar of events that would occur annually in Beijing meaning that each intervention would be unique.