Two Cities, One Table: A Yonsei × CUHK Collaboration at Design Factory Korea

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At Design Factory Korea (DFK), learning routinely crosses borders. This year spring, that spirit took the shape of a fully international classroom: CDM1011 "Design and City in Culture," a collaborative course co-taught by Professor Bokyung Lee of Yonsei University's Underwood International College (UIC) and Professor Pei-Chi Chung of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).

Run as a hybrid, Zoom-connected studio, the course brought students from Yonsei and CUHK into mixed teams who spent a semester designing across two cities at once. As part of the Design Factory Global Network (DFGN), it embodied DFK's belief that the most meaningful cultural and social innovation happens where different perspectives meet.

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Designing across two cities

The brief was as delicious as it was serious. Each team was asked to plan a cultural event that connects the local food cultures of Hong Kong and Korea with a pressing social issue each city faces — from climate to inequality to social isolation. Bringing together two themes rarely spoken of in the same breath — cuisine and civic concern — demanded sharp storytelling and genuine cultural sensitivity.

Working in the same Korea–Hong Kong teams throughout, students moved from a cultural business proposal at mid-term to a final concept advanced through speculative design and communication — including a virtual exhibition built in Unity and generative-AI tools.

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Two field trips, two cultures

What made the course unforgettable were its two exchange field trips.

• Hong Kong (Mar 30 – Apr 3): Selected Yonsei students traveled to Hong Kong to experience the city's cultural landscape, urban visual systems, and design communities firsthand — meeting their teammates and conducting field research on the ground.
• Seoul (Jun 23 – 27): CUHK students visited Seoul in return, culminating in the Final Presentation Day on June 26 at Yonsei's Sinchon campus, where teams shared their completed cultural-event concepts.

Immersed in each other's cities, students learned to read a place through its food, its streets, and its social realities — and to design for both.

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Meet the teams

Facing the same brief, the seven teams — five from Yonsei and two from CUHK — arrived at strikingly different futures:

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Corporate Cafeteria 2050 (Group A) — Set inside the employee cafeteria of a future mega-corporation where productivity is the highest social value, meals are engineered to maximize focus and even determine career rank. A speculative warning about hustle culture and the moment food stops being nourishment and becomes fuel.

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Culture Gone in a Cube (Group B) — In a future where efficiency has overtaken culture, Seoul and Hong Kong's foods — Tanka boat noodles, dim sum, tteokbokki — are compressed into identical nutrient cubes. Convenient, optimized, and stripped of the migration, labor, and memory that once gave them meaning.

The Toxic Table: Taste of Waste (Group C) — After a landfill ban forces every household to incinerate its own trash, ash becomes an ingredient and steam becomes a meal. At the "Yum Cha Aerosol Station," diners inhale nutrient vapor instead of eating — a biting take on the urban waste crisis facing both cities.

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Face Value: A Taste of Perfection (Group D, Yonsei) — A speculative restaurant, built in Unity, where every guest pays the same price but a beauty scanner assigns a rank that decides what they may eat and where they may sit. "You paid the same price — what did your face allow you to taste?" A sharp reflection on lookism and unequal access.

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Consuming Pressure (Group E) — Four scenarios tracing how youth unemployment and body-image expectations reshape the way people eat across Korea and Hong Kong — including "Morning Bed Hansang," a Korean breakfast redesigned for withdrawn young people who never leave their rooms.

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Where design meets social innovation

Designated a Social Innovation Certificate (SIC) course, CDM1011 asked students not just to design beautifully, but to design meaningfully. By pairing a real social issue with the everyday act of eating, the course gave students a way to make abstract civic problems tangible — and to practice design as a tool for asking better questions, not only making better objects. Learning across two campuses, two cultures, and one shared brief, they left with something a single-classroom course rarely offers: the habit of seeing their own city through someone else's.

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Two cities, two cuisines, one shared table of ideas — this is exactly the kind of borderless, socially engaged design that DFK exists to make possible.