Bronze Interior Space and Exhibition Design · 2025
Hkhs Exhibition Centre Design
by Dennis Wong
- A' Design Award 2025 Bronze Winner in Interior Space and Exhibition Design
- Awarded April 15, 2025
- CLIENT: Hong Kong Housing Society
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 18,902
- Verification code 20D58C5D2D · Verify this award
About Hkhs Exhibition Centre Design
The refurbished Exhibition Centre instils public confidence by underscoring Hong Kong Housing Society’s 70 year legacy serving Hong Kong. Innovative exhibits such as immersive VR and digital twin engage visitors. Visitors irrigate the centerpiece tree, symbolizing bridging citizens and housing policy and representing its people focus commitment and efforts. The old video with VR goggles is turned into a LED dome with VR. The challenge is how to configure the dome into an acute angled space. All in all, the Centre inspires trust and longing for better homes, vital for Hkhs’s progress.
Oval Design Limited's Hkhs Exhibition Centre Design emerges from contemporary exhibition design practice that increasingly recognizes spatial environments as active communicative agents rather than passive containers for information, reflecting broader shifts within museum studies and visitor experience design toward immersive, participatory, and emotionally resonant educational environments. The installation demonstrates sophisticated understanding of how architectural form, chromatic strategy, material selection, and lighting orchestration can work synergistically to establish thematic content and guide visitor behavior, employing a biophilic design vocabulary of organic circular geometries and verdant yellow-green palette that evokes natural growth systems, cellular structures, and botanical phenomena, potentially signaling institutional values centered on environmental stewardship, community health, sustainable urban development, or ecological awareness. The compositional achievement centers on the sculptural installation of concentric laminated wooden ribs that rise in rhythmic tiers, creating a focal anchor that rewards close examination while establishing radial organizational logic for the surrounding interactive stations and display zones, this central element demonstrating technical facility in both structural engineering and formal aesthetics, its layered construction producing dimensional depth and dynamic shadow patterns that enliven the vertical element throughout varying viewing angles and visitor circulation paths. The chromatic sophistication appears in the calibrated gradient transitions within the suspended circular canopies overhead, each disc presenting subtle shifts from acidic chartreuse through spring green to cooler sage and celadon tones, these luminous elements functioning simultaneously as wayfinding devices, atmospheric mood-setters, spatial zone markers, and visual metaphors for growth, vitality, and organic processes, their backlit translucency creating gentle ambient glow that softens the potentially austere quality of informational exhibition spaces while maintaining adequate illumination levels for comfortable reading and screen interaction. The spatial planning reveals careful attention to circulation flow and sightline management, with curved partition walls and generous rounded portal openings that avoid visual barriers and encourage exploratory movement between zones, the portal geometries creating framed views that preview adjacent content areas and establish visual connectivity across the exhibition footprint, while the strategic placement of interactive kiosks on vibrant chartreuse carpet circles activates specific engagement nodes within the broader spatial field. The material palette demonstrates restraint and coherence, limiting the vocabulary to pale wood tones, crisp white casework, saturated yellow-green accents, neutral gray carpet, and black ceiling infrastructure, this disciplined selection allowing chromatic and formal strategies to register clearly without competing visual noise, the contrast between smooth industrial materials of the interactive stations and the layered dimensional quality of the wooden sculpture establishing textural variety that invites both visual and implied tactile engagement. The integration of digital interface technology within physical architectural elements suggests thoughtful consideration of contemporary museum visitor expectations for interactive, personalized, and technology-mediated learning experiences, the angled presentation surfaces and integrated screens offering multiple engagement modalities that accommodate diverse learning preferences and accessibility needs. The work invites consideration of how exhibition environments can function as three-dimensional translations of organizational identity and mission, employing spatial form, color psychology, material character, and experiential sequencing to communicate abstract institutional values through embodied visitor experience, asking viewers to contemplate the relationship between environmental design and meaning-making, between spatial atmosphere and information retention, and between aesthetic pleasure and educational effectiveness.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- Re-opened in March 2024, the refurbished Exhibition Centre of the Hong Kong Housing Society (HKHS) is a small place tasked to achieve a big goal. It is a key HKHS avenue to instil public confidence through underpinning a laudable message: HKHS has been a reliable and dedicated housing provider for Hong Kong in the past 70 years. They are committed to play the same role going forward and will continue to be an unwavering housing partner of Hong Kong families in the long run.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- Area 200 sqm, ceiling height 3m, ceiling clearance 2.5m
- Tags
- exhibition, interactive, multimedia, community, sustainability, people-oriented
- Production Technology
- Interactive kiosk controlled by old telephone, LED dome with 360 VR, 3D naked-eye animation, digital twin, instant polling with real time visualisation
- Design Challenge
- Challenges have pushed OVAL to escalate to a higher level of design acumen and craftsmanship. 20% of the total floor area is laid out in acute-angled configuration whilst low ceiling clearance at 2.5m aggravated the spacing issue. The solution of putting the 270-degree VR projection on dome-shaped screen in the triangle was a no-turning-back option due to post-Covid reluctance to use goggles. Lastly, OVAL must surf through voluminous content simultaneously for proposing on touch point anchors.
- Project Duration
- The project started in September 2023 and finished in March 2024 in Hong Kong.
- Operation Flow
- Curated contents are displayed in three zones for sight by visitors who mostly come in as guided-tour participants. Each zone is filled up by exhibition items attired in multiple formats: physical boards, digital screens with physical levers for access to information and interactive games on computers and physical platforms. They lined up in a circular flow to echo with three themes: ‘Creating Homes for the Community’; ‘The Housing Ladder’ and ‘Creating Homes for Sustainable Living’.
- Research
- Research was done in three different directions. User research revealed that less text and more humanised features were preferred. Communication strategy research whereby HKHS management repositioned the new Centre as an avenue for instilling public trust. Technical research calibrating the combination of 270-degree VR projection on a dome-shaped screen with content rotation triggered by motion sensing technology for accommodating visitors of different body sizes and heights.
- Inspiration
- In Hong Kong, there are families who wait for 5 years for a shelter in a public rental estate. The message disseminated by the Centre carries weight among them. OVAL’s effort is to enable visitors to take home a special experience that makes them feel connected with the message and cast their trust with HKHS. Content-wise, there is a lot to say. As for tone and manner, the visitor should be warmed by the ambience and the features that he touches and maneuvers during the visit.
- Image Credits
- OVAL Design Limited
- Patents
- OVAL Design Limited
Colors of Hkhs Exhibition Centre Design
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Award-Winning Exhibition and Experience Design
We transform spaces into immersive brand experiences through strategic exhibition design and multimedia installations. With over 30 years of expertise, our team delivers complete solutions from concept through production for museums, visitor centers, and corporate showrooms.
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