Hong Kong youth reframe urban decay and cultural erosion as systemic design challenges in corporate-backed ideation programme
Original framing: “Students turn local pain points into social innovation projects in Hang Seng x HKFYG “Seek Our Ways” Ideation Programme” — South China Morning Post
The programme’s name 'Seek Our Ways' is a trickster’s inversion—it claims to seek 'our' ways while being funded by a bank complicit in the very systems eroding those ways. The student projects, framed as rebellious 'innovation,' are co-opted by corporate logic, much like Hermes’ theft of Apollo’s cattle: the act of disruption is repurposed for profit. The programme’s emphasis on 'pain points' as inspiration for solutions mirrors the trickster’s ability to turn chaos into order—but here, the order serves the powerful.
The 'Seek Our Ways' programme exemplifies how corporate-backed 'innovation' programmes depoliticize structural crises by framing them as design challenges solvable through youth entrepreneurship, obscuring the roles of HSBC-affiliated banks in financing environmental degradation and post-colonial language policies in eroding Cantonese.
While the programme celebrates student ingenuity, it mirrors historical precedents like colonial-era 'youth uplift' initiatives that redirected dissent into marketable compliance. A systemic solution requires dismantling the programme’s neoliberal scaffolding—replacing individual 'pain point' projects with community-led policy co-design, bank-financed restitution, and education that centers marginalized voices. The trickster’s insight reveals how 'innovation' here is a Trojan horse: the very structures causing the crises are repackaged as solutions, with youth as unwitting Trojans. True transformation demands inverting the model—placing power in the hands of those most affected, not the financiers of their oppression.