Experiencing Truly Quick Production in Hong Kong

This week, I participated in the ‘Intencity’, a workshop on urban design at Connecting Spaces in Hong Kong. I will write more about the workshop in a separate post, but here I would just like to write about my experience of producing a physical prototype in Hong Kong within 24 hours.

In this workshop, I decided to produce a Chinese Chess set with pieces I had designed myself. If you watch the video above, you will see that Chinese Chess is played with flat pieces, each of which is labelled with a Chinese character denoting its function as well as a color, usually black and red. Otherwise, it is very similar to western chess, except that some of the pieces move differently. This gives the entire game quite a different dynamic.

I decided to alter the meaning of the pieces, so that they would match the current political situation.  Many of the Hong Kong residents are resisting the announcement of the Chinese government to only allow candidates for election who were previously vetted by this same government. I will post more on this separately.

By the time I had something to work with, it was Thursday morning, and the exhibition would start merely 30 hours from then. I originally wanted to produce the pieces with wood, but after I hadn’t been able to find a laser cutter willing to produce wooden pieces, I settled for acrylic at a production company just down the road.

They were initially a bit grumpy because I didn’t speak Cantonese, but I could feel they were up to the task. Only one of their workers spoke some English. But after getting Michael to help me out with some Cantonese to grease the gears, the guys were super enthusiastic to produce the pieces, and started right away to experiment (I mean, instantly!) By Thursday at 4.30 we had a piece that looked the way I wanted it, about 1.5 cm thick, with a rim and the empty space around the character on top of the piece etched out.

Because the pieces were now going to be transparent, I planned to use nail polish to paint the underside to give the pieces their color. The production company promised to finish production by 1p.m. the next day, which would give me about 3 hours to the start of the exhibition to paint the pieces.

 

The next morning I went to their shop at around 11a.m. to check on the progress, only to find that they were already done. But not only that, they actually had experimented with various techniques to paint the pieces as well. And one of them turned out to be amazing, an idea I wouldn’t have had myself: instead of painting the underside, they spray-painted the etched-out part of the piece and cleaned off any excess paint with dissolvent. This produced a fantastic looking piece.

Only, they didn’t have the time to do it for me. A simple question was enough, and they allowed me to use their shop, their spray paint (which is quite expensive) and the dissolvent to finish production. It was simply amazing. I had a fantastic looking chess set within less than 24 hours after starting production, and was on time for the exhibit. Hong Kong truly proved to be living up to its reputation as a city where everything is possible.