Winners
PolyU School of Design Young Design Talent Award
Kwok Hoi Yan, Zoe

Communication Design | Graduate of PolyU SD (Communication Design)

"Design has the power to inspire thought. I aspire to cultivate a deeper social awareness and a broader global outlook, addressing complex challenges and presenting ideas that can drive meaningful change."

 

Zoe graduated from the School of Design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2024, majoring in Communication Design, with a focus on typography, graphic design and information design. She believes that design’s power extends beyond creating visual enjoyment—it can convey important messages and even influence societal change. By simplifying complex issues, design makes them more accessible to the public. During her 2022 summer internship at South China Morning Post, Zoe contributed to Hot Summer Days, an infographic that depicted Hong Kong's temperature changes over the last 100 years, raising awareness of the worsening impact of global warming.

 

As a young designer raised in the digital era, Zoe is particularly attuned to the challenges of information overload and fragmentation. Her graduation project, TO SAVE, SAVING, SAVED, addresses these concerns through three pieces: a mobile archiving platform (TO SAVE), a small book (SAVING), and two books (SAVED). Through data analysis and infographic design, she examines how young people today consume information online, their preferences, and the impact different types of content have on them. The project encourages reflection on how we allocate our attention across various forms of information.

 

Zoe first encountered community design in her second year of university, sparking a passion evident in her projects Have a walk with me in Tokwawan and How to use a scooter to pick up kindergarten children from school in Kowloon city?. The former, a zine, documents the Tokwawan community before the completion of the Sha Tin to Central Link, with her photographs and writing capturing the area’s essence throughout different times of the day, making readers feel as though they’re strolling alongside her. The latter was a design prototype experiment outside a kindergarten in Kowloon City, offering a new mobility experience for children and parents, where she realised how design can tangibly improve everyday life.

 

Last summer, Zoe interned at a design studio in Spain, where the working methods of local designers and the city's vibrant culture significantly broadened her perspectives. She now hopes to further her studies in contemporary art in the UK, expanding her creative approach and preparing herself to tackle more complex design challenges in the future.

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