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Program Highlight
As the world enters the era of Design Thinking 3.0, Hong Kong, for the first time in December 2024, introduced AI-powered design research applied to ESG (environmental, social, and governance) community development projects. We integrated self-developed Social Listening Technologies with Traditional Empathy Interviews, specifically designed to address the operational challenges the Sham Shui Po Fabric Market faced after its relocation.
In the “Innovation Jam 2024” program, co-organized with the Hong Kong Design Centre, we successfully analyzed over 70,000 sets of user preference data within just five days. Additionally, we thoroughly examined 268 articles from 37 key opinion leaders (KOLs). Moreover, we integrated insights from over 1,000 conversations from on-site empathy interviews.
This project showcases the groundbreaking power of AI-driven design thinking (including Determining Challenges, Discovering Information, Defining Opportunities, Developing Ideas, Delivering Solutions and Driving Changes), reducing the timeline for Hong Kong community development projects from 26 weeks to just 1 week, with a staggering 95% increase in efficiency, unlocking new possibilities.
This data swiftly and precisely revealed the three core areas of concern for the market’s clientele, providing key insights to enhance the formulation of its community positioning, development strategy, promotional focus, event themes, and the combination of stalls and their products.
Part 1: Background
Sham Shui Po, historically central to Hong Kong’s textile industry, has transformed into a vibrant hub for local designers and artisans, showcasing a diverse array of textiles, decorations, and fabrics. The Cheung Sha Wan Street Temporary Hawker Market, known locally as “Pang Jai,” has been a key fabric trading center since 1978. Following its 2023 relocation to the Sham Shui Po New Fabric Market (深水埗新布藝市場), affectionately known as “New Pang Jai,” visitor numbers have declined noticeably. Addressing this issue, the Hong Kong Design Centre (HKDC) seeks to collaborate with the community to analyze the root causes and develop innovative solutions deeply.
Given our prominence in Hong Kong’s design thinking sector, HKDC has invited us to co-host “Innovation Jam 2024: Co-creative Community Design Journey for Sham Shui Po Fabric Market” in December 2024. This initiative involves university students, social workers, volunteers, and teachers on field visits to the fabric market. By engaging directly with the market environment, we will help participants devise innovative strategies for improvement. This project aims to tackle the market’s current challenges and revitalize the Sham Shui Po Fabric Market through community collaboration and design thinking, reinforcing its historical significance in Hong Kong’s cultural and economic landscape.
Part 2: Limitations of Traditional Design Research
In traditional design thinking (i.e., Design Thinking 1.0), design research techniques such as one-on-one empathy interviews excel in uncovering deep emotional insights, personal motivations, and specific situational needs. However, these methods rely on smaller sample sizes and highly specialized questioning techniques, which limit their ability to capture broader trends and diverse perspectives.
Particularly in complex environments like the Sham Shui Po Fabric Market, facing a multitude of stakeholders, including individual and commercial clients, residents, tourists, and various social strata across Hong Kong, comprehensively understanding these users’ needs requires significant time and effort. This considerably increases the research challenges and complexity. Therefore, in this community development project encompassing ESG aspects, we have decided to employ AI-powered design research techniques to enhance research efficiency and effectiveness.
Part 3: Implementation of AI-Powered Design Research
Under the framework of AI-powered design research techniques, we integrated Our Social Listening Technologies into this project before conducting empathy interviews. By analyzing data from social media, online forums, and news outlets, we gained a comprehensive understanding of user needs and market trends. This approach allows us to develop deep, actionable insights, ensuring a robust dataset informs our research.
Under the leadership of Mr. Luke Chu, Chairman of the Hong Kong Internet & Ecommerce Association, our project has utilized advanced technologies such as web crawlers, natural language processing (NLP), and sentiment analysis to analyze online conversations over the past 12 months (from January 1, 2024, to December 10, 2024) with an accuracy rate of up to 90%. This precision captures real-time, scalable insights into user demands, greatly enhancing our monitoring capabilities across social media, forums, and blogs. For further details, please refer to the diagrams below.
Part 4: Identification of Users’ Most Common Conversations
After extensive web crawling and data mining from public social media, news, and forums in Hong Kong over the past 12 months, the term “designers” (設計師) stood out as a key group-related phrase linked to our primary keyword, “布藝市場 棚仔.” This discovery led to in-depth desk research into their specific needs, pinpointing “environmental materials” (環保物料) as a focal point of interest. To refine our insights, we iterated our search terms, ultimately focusing on “環保物料,” “布料,” and “設計師” for a third phase of comprehensive research across multiple platforms.
This targeted approach is designed to gather more precise data directly relevant to our project objectives and problem statement. Our analysis, which incorporated over 70,000 relevant hashtags and sentiments from social media, along with content from forums and news comments throughout Hong Kong over the past year, is meticulously depicted in the diagram below.
We conducted a thorough analysis of 268 articles authored by 37 key opinion leaders (KOLs), spanning a broad spectrum of community influence indices ranging from 0.02 to 222.78. This comprehensive review effectively captures the diverse impact levels within the community, with an average influence index of 16.51.
Moreover, our findings indicate that designers are increasingly eager to access eco-friendly and organic materials within the next year. This urgency underscores a significant trend towards sustainable, eco-conscious materials in the design industry, driven by rising consumer demand for eco-friendly products. The detailed results of this analysis are displayed in the diagram below, offering a clear visual representation of the current market dynamics and the growing importance of sustainability in design.
Part 5: Integrating On-Site Empathy Interviews with Online Social Listening Data
To obtain deeper insights from quantitative data collected through social listening, integrating qualitative research methods to thoroughly explore user needs is incredibly vital. Therefore, we have employed one of the globally recognized emotional analysis tools, James A. Russell’s Circumplex Model of Affect, to analyze user emotions.
This model divides emotions into four quadrants: the top-left quadrant represents intense negative emotions such as anger; the top-right quadrant represents intense positive emotions such as excitement; the bottom-left quadrant represents milder negative emotions such as sadness; and the bottom-right quadrant represents mild positive emotions such as calmness. This helps us better understand and address users’ emotional needs. For further details, please refer to the diagram below.
Conducting on-site empathy interviews is a key strategy that effectively deepens our understanding of broader data trends identified through digital means. These on-site interview activities were meticulously planned and led by design-thinking experts Mr. Paul Lee and Ms. Tiffany Liu, who guided a team of 20 members in this rigorous fieldwork. On December 14, 2024, we successfully conducted over 70 on-site interviews, covering more than 1,000 conversations.
This qualitative research method not only enriched our interpretation of the data collected through social listening but also allowed us to comprehensively grasp the users’ needs—including unmet, potential, and hidden needs—as well as related emotions, which are crucial for a thorough analysis.
Furthermore, the insights from these on-site interviews are indispensable for counteracting the biases often propagated by Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs). By directly interacting with a diverse group of market participants, these interviews provided us with fresh perspectives that enabled us to question and recalibrate the influence of KOLs.
Part 6: Identification of Users’ Major Demands
We have adopted the innovative Design Thinking 3.0 framework, combining insights from social listening with empirical data collected from on-site empathy interviews to analyze highly relevant, deep insights. Specifically, regarding the main customers of the fabric market—designers’ attention to “環保布料” (eco-friendly fabrics), and “布料產地” (fabric origins), we found the following important information:
- 90% of designers state that purchasing and using eco-friendly fabrics is important or very important to them
- 70% of designers consider the supply of eco-friendly fabrics a significant factor in their decision to visit the fabric market.
- 60% of designers express uncertainty about whether the fabric market offers sufficient eco-friendly options.
- 50% of designers believe that the origin of the fabrics is an important or very important factor in their decision to visit the market.
The data not only highlight designers’ strong emphasis on environmental sustainability and origin labeling but also remind us of the need to strengthen the supply chain further and enhance information transparency in the fabric market to better meet the demands of professional clients. This targeted user insight will assist the new Sham Shui Po fabric market in precisely formulating its community positioning, development strategy, promotional focus, event themes, and stall combinations and products. This will not only enhance the customer purchasing experience but also drive the fabric market toward greater sustainability and responsibility.
Part 7: Insights for Social Innovators, Traditional Design Thinkers, and Business Leaders
Against the backdrop of Design Thinking 3.0, integrating AI-driven design research with social listening and traditional empathy interviews offers a revolutionary strategy for quickly and deeply understanding user needs. This is a key competitive advantage for leaders operating in complex, dynamic environments daily.
For Social Innovators, AI-driven design research provides an in-depth understanding of community needs, especially the individual needs of vulnerable groups, ensuring that solutions resonate across cultures and communities. Importantly, where some disadvantaged groups were previously reluctant to participate in interviews, social listening can overcome these barriers, enabling us to capture their true voices and needs more accurately and thereby design more attractive and effective solutions.
For Traditional Design Thinkers, AI-driven design research expands their perspective, enabling them to gather broader user feedback through social listening, reduce bias, and deliver solutions more quickly and precisely. More importantly, traditional training for design thinkers usually focuses on mindset and technical skills rather than technology. Therefore, they should gradually master different tools of AI design thinking and integrate them into their daily innovation tasks to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of their innovations.
For Business Leaders, social listening enables real-time market responsiveness, while empathy interviews ensure that solutions are rooted in genuine user experiences. This dual strategy can create differentiated, meaningful, and innovative products and services, and even business models, that adapt flexibly to market changes and enhance customer loyalty, thereby establishing their pioneering status in the industry. Additionally, this strategy enhances the company’s ability to respond to market fluctuations, maintain a leading position in competitive markets, and accelerate innovation, thereby promoting sustained business growth.
