bodw Future Lab
Description
bodw Future Lab is our new space for experimentation, collaboration, and creative exchange. It is the immersive heart of BODW Summit 2025 where your curiosity becomes our collective action. This immersive space invites participants to explore bold ideas, discuss emerging technologies, and engage in collaborative exchanges that push boundaries in design, business, and innovation. It will keep you at the cutting edge of creativity.
Designed to be an open, interactive environment, Future Lab encourages active participation, spontaneous dialogue, and hands-on exploration. It marks BODW as different, moving away from formal presentations toward more conversational and collaborative formats. More than just a showcase, Future Lab is a dedicated space for inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural dialogue, bringing together designers, technologists, business leaders, and creative thinkers from Hong Kong and the world, with a special focus on generational exchange and collaboration between Hong Kong and our 2025 partner country, Italy.
By connecting emerging talent with established voices, and local needs with global networks, Future Lab invites all participants to take part in shaping the future… together. Don’t just be a passive listener… be an active voice.
Collaboration with INSTILL
INSTILL, founded by Prof. Rama Gheerawo, is a creative consultancy dedicated to transforming organisations through Inclusive Design, Design Thinking and Creative Leadership. Rooted in over two decades of global collaboration and grounded in the belief that design is a force for human good, INSTILL works at the intersection of empathy, innovation, and impact.
Rama brings his pioneering Empathy–Clarity–Creativity (ECC) framework, from his Penguin bestseller Creative Leadership: How to Design the 21st Century Organisation, to shape Future Lab as a space for learning, experimentation, and business application.
In this inaugural edition of bodw Future Lab, INSTILL partners with the Hong Kong Design Centre (HKDC) to design and facilitate the full programme experience.
We are structuring the four sessions around discovery, collaboration, and insight. Together, we aim to:
• Reveal emerging futures: contextualised for Hong Kong yet globally resonant. Use design to translate trends into action.
• Differentiate through experience: positioning Future Lab as BODW’s living, breathing innovation hub, established at BODW with programmes carrying into 2026.
• Shape meaningful questions: not just answers, to spark reflection, curiosity, and long-term change. Your “go-to” place for future strategy across four key areas.
• Create a blueprint for growth: building a repeatable model for future editions.
• Foster connection and co-creation: across generations, sectors, and cultures.
• Connect Diverse Voices: Bring together varied perspectives across disciplines and cultures towards inclusive and creative goals.
• Stretch mental and creative boundaries: encouraging new ways of seeing, thinking, and doing for organisations across business, government, education and the public sector.
Each session will be captured visually and textually, with INSTILL delivering a Future Lab Report and Visual Record that documents our collective insights, creative outcomes, and frameworks for us all to share.
Session Details
Lab 1 – Urban Vision: Creating a Future-Inclusive City
This Lab explores how inclusive design can shape the future of cities — blending human-centric design, sustainability, and innovation into a cohesive vision for urban life. Participants will collaborate on actionable ideas and outputs that highlight the importance of designing cities that are inclusive, accessible, and resilient for all.
Lab 2 – Designing the Living City: Reimagining Urban Spaces
This Lab explores how design, creativity, and community collaboration can reimagine urban spaces and bring cities to life. It focuses on how art, music, and public design interventions can transform underused environments into vibrant places of connection and expression. For example, participants might explore how Hong Kong’s Central–Mid-Levels Escalator could be reimagined — turning an everyday route through SoHo’s backstreets into a living cultural corridor of art, music, and design. Participants will work together to generate ideas that turn the city into a living, participatory canvas — where culture, creativity, and design shape everyday experience.
Lab 3 – Creative Leadership in the Age of AI
In a world of constant change, creative leadership is no longer a luxury — it’s a necessity. This Lab invites participants to rethink how they lead, collaborate, and innovate by blending human creativity with the intelligent tools of the AI era. It explores how empathy, clarity, and creativity — the essential human dimensions of leadership — can be amplified through responsible and imaginative use of technology.
Built on Rama Gheerawo’s Empathy–Clarity–Creativity (ECC) framework from his Penguin-published book Creative Leadership (2025), the session shows how AI can enhance rather than replace the human aspects of leadership. Through a mix of short talks, real-world examples, and hands-on exercises, participants will experience what it means to lead with authenticity, vision, and purpose in a rapidly evolving landscape.
Lab 4 – Luxury as Experience: Redefining Value and Desire
In a world where meaning matters more than possession, luxury is being redefined — evolving from product to experience. This workshop explores how craftsmanship, storytelling, creativity, and technology together are reshaping the experience of luxury — transforming it into something deeply emotional, personal, and human. Participants will investigate how these elements are redefining value and desire within the luxury sector, including the rise of new audiences such as Hong Kong’s ageing population and the expanding “silver economy,” where design and experience are redefining aspiration later in life.