泥玩 Soil Trust : 集「棄」還田

20/12/2025

We are delighted about new article that connects design with soil. Bringing multispecies design into dialogue with epistemology and bioregioning, this paper seeks to move beyond empathetic or celebratory accounts of more-than-human entanglements to examine how value, aesthetics, power and ecological transformation are materially enacted through practice-led multispecies collaborations.

Open access download:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/398895788_'Nai_Waan'_niwan_designing_working_relationships_with_soil

Official publication:
https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2025.2604642

27/08/2025

Sharing our story!

Speaking and exhibiting at the 2025 Design Research Impact and Global Insights Colloquia and Exhibition at

Our exhibition will be up until Sept 29 in , so please check it out!

22/01/2025

We are delighted that The Higher Education (THE) Awards Asia 2024 has shortlisted our "Soil Trust: Co-producing Local Soil-to-Soil Food Economies" entry among the top 8 entries in the category "Outstanding Contribution to Regional Development". This year THE Awards Asia received well over 500 entries and shortlisted 80 projects across 10 categories.

Category: Outstanding Contribution to Regional Development
Project: Soil Trust: Co-producing Local Soil-to-Soil Food Economies
School: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, School of Design

Outline: This industry-community alliance between a local farm, hotel, welfare centre, eco-hospitality foundation, food retailer and university is experimenting with eco-social agricultural formats to engage diverse, intergenerational populations in land-care practices. To sustain its regenerative farm operation, the Soil Trust developed the Growers Without Borders service-learning programme. In this programme, ethnic minority mothers, undergraduate design students, and Locavore families committed to weekly farm work in return for access to arable land, harvest, upskilling and companionship. This eco-social format allowed the implementation of soil-bound nutrient cycling of kitchen scraps from a downtown hotel that sponsored the operation. Through this intersectoral enactment, hotel staff, agriculturalists, volunteers and design students invested their time and resources towards the unifying purpose of promoting local soil health, fertiliser self-sufficiency, greenhouse gas reduction and quality food access to the underprivileged, thereby enacting concrete forms of urban/rural co-development in daily life.

08/01/2025

We started 2025 with a delightful conversation thanks to Will from Sunday Mingpao (星期日生活) newspaper with Soil Trust (泥玩) members Kam Fai Chan, Jonathan Yu, and Josh Wolper. We discussed we can design for responsiveness (rather than solutions) through humble exploration, ongoing cooperation and introspection. Also, we shared our approach of stimulating bio-social diversity whereby farmers, consumers, artists, researchers, hotels, activists, hotels, animals, plants and bacteria become members of a co-beneficial working alliance—an method that we summarised in our recent book release titled Soil Trust Farm Studio (泥玩農場工室), downloadable as Open Education Resource here:
https://ira.lib.polyu.edu.hk/handle/10397/110080

30/11/2024

What can designers do with soil? Our just released book "Soil Trust Farm Studio (泥玩農場工作室)" portraits a design undertaking that engaged a hotel, retailer, farm, and households to regenerate soils from upcycled waste. The book published as Open Educational Resource (ORC) contains methods, recipes, reflections and testimonials to inspire multiplications elsewhere (DIN B5, 160 pages, 700 illustrations).

E-Book download: http://hdl.handle.net/10397/110080

Paperpack (limited edition): https://forms.gle/7oQ3h3hXLqHpjLAZA

#泥玩 #泥土 #香港 #波卡西 #教育

16/11/2024

This week the Soil Trust team had the honour to receive the Don Norman Design Award titled ‘Promising in Humanity-Centred Design’ in San Diego. At the ceremony, we were asked to share our learning journey that is reproduced below. After the presentation, audience members that included practitioners and educators from research, industry and business commented that Soil Trust offers a blueprint to be implemented elsewhere, the importance of creating experimental learning spaces with lived more-than-human relationships at the center.

We are grateful for the DNDA award since it recognizes how local industry, higher education, and communities can work closely together to revitalize local landscapes and address climate change in mutually beneficial ways.

https://dnda.design/2024/en/page/awardee-0cge9jnq5wilp03

#泥玩 #泥土 #香港 #波卡西 #教育 .design

15/10/2024

Never stop exploring. We recently started experimenting using our fruit peel brew (eco-enzyme) as a passive innoculant for new bioremediation purposes and eco-social adventures. The first results are encouraging.

#泥玩 #泥土 #香港 #波卡西 #教育

10/09/2024

We are delighted that our Soil Trust (泥玩) project has just received international recognition with the 2024 Don Norman Design Award (DNDA) in the category of "Promising Project." The award for Soil Trust (泥玩) acknowledges how higher education, community and industry can work closely together to revitalize local landscapes and address climate change in convivial ways. It also makes us look beyond obstacles and keep working on our eco-social agricultural vision.
https://dnda.design/2024/en/page/awardee-0cge9jnq5wilp03

The Don Norman Design Award celebrates design that is meaningful, sustainable, and humanity-centered. The award aims to inspire a new generation of designers and educators to create positive change through thoughtful and inclusive projects that enhance the well-being of humanity, considering diverse cultures, the environment, and all living beings.
https://dnda.design/2024/en/page/awardees -projects

24/08/2024

Last week Soil Trust was invited to present a tactile showcase of waste-to-soil nutrients cycling for the management of a major property developer. Located on the 27th floor of an office building inside a spanking new town district, we engaged the 100 member strong corporate team with the tactile qualities of organic waste materials and the regenerative opportunities of soil-based upcycling. It prompted surprise, conversations and simple delights. Thank you to Bertha from Earthero, as well as Josh and Esther to make this outreach happen!

#泥玩 #泥土 #香港 #波卡西 #教育

11/08/2024

Last week Soil Trust had the honour to show the 25-minute documentary "Belongs-to-the-Field Social Pilot: From Wasteful Disconnects to Soil Connectivity in Hong Kong" at the International Conference for Asian Studies (ICAS) in Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia. The screening brought together anthropologists, designers, agrarians, artists and curators working with soils and/or communities to engage with deep time, biopolitics, grounding social formations, and more-than-human entanglements.

10/07/2024

21/06/2024

Visited today the "Material Ecologies: Local Practices and Global Impacts" summer school by Hong Kong University's Division of Landscape Architecture, Department of Architecture and found this : the loamy base soil collected one year ago by Susanne Trumpf from the Soil Trust Farm Studio. Her students will finely grind this soil and combine with natural binders to make bio-bricks from it. Long live Soil Trust!

-to-soil #泥玩 #泥土 #香港