Wow summer camp

WOW Summer Camp invited children to create their own “Village of Happiness” through architecture, art and food. Across 24 creative workshops, students took on villager roles, explored the city, created through the senses, and turned daily life into stories, models and shared culture.

Presented and organised by PMQ, with AaaM Architects as collaborating partner and programme designer, WOW Summer Camp formed part of the 2018 WOW SUMMER programme. The wider campaign began with three ideas — Wonder, Open-minded and Works — encouraging children to open up their imagination through curiosity, playful thinking and making.

AaaM developed the camp as a design education programme rooted in daily life. The course started from questions children could feel and respond to: Where can happiness be found? What makes a place suitable for living? How do people share space, food, nature, memories and stories? Through games, role-play and creative tasks, children followed their curiosity while practising choice-making, judgement and self-expression.

The primary school camp was developed around the theme Tales of My Village of Happiness. Children entered the programme as “little villagers,” taking on roles such as village chief, architect, journalist, environmental pioneer, craftsperson, designer, food expert or storyteller.

Through role-play, games and co-creation, each group gradually built a village with its own rules, public spaces, traditions and festivals. This imagined village gave children an open and protected setting to think about different kinds of community questions.

AaaM structured the programme around three creative areas closely connected to daily life: architecture, art and food. Architecture helped students think about space, scale, function, routes, public space, and the relationship between city and nature. Art offered a visual language for expression, character-building and storytelling. Food brought creativity back to the body, linking colour, texture, smell, taste, memory and culture.

The course was led by AaaM Architects together with artist and children’s art educator Zoe Liu, and PMQ Taste Library curator Andy Lai. Children moved between drawing, collage, handcraft modelling, photography, food-making, storybook production and verbal sharing. The camp worked like a small creative village, where different media became ways for children to express themselves and understand others.

The four-day journey moved between imagination and reality. On the first day, children created their own village, selected roles, invented treasures, set village rules and built early models. On the second day, they took maps and cameras into Central and Sheung Wan, looking for real city spaces that connected with their imagined village. Streets, slopes, old buildings, greenery, waterfronts, public corners and dense urban fragments were brought back into their stories.

Each class worked with one of three themes: Greenery, High Density, or Old and New. These themes gave children simple and clear lenses to read Hong Kong. Some villages grew through forests and self-sufficient landscapes. Some responded to height, density and movement. Others explored preservation, redevelopment and the meeting of old and new. Photographs, sketches and models gradually connected children’s imagined worlds with what they observed in the city.

The later part of the course brought the village to a more personal and sensory scale. Children used food ingredients to design festive snacks for their villages, connecting taste, colour, smell and texture with emotions, habits and memories. They then gathered their drawings, photographs, models and food stories into village tales.

By the end of the course, every child had left a trace in the shared world. The villages contained buildings, routes, characters, rules, festivals, food cultures and future problems to be solved. Storybooks, one-minute sharing exercises and handcrafted models recorded how children built their imagined worlds through play, observation, making and reflection.

After the summer camp, students’ works were later presented at PMQ’s WOW Exhibition – Imagination in Bloom, bringing their villages, models and stories back into public view.

For AaaM, the project explored how design education can begin with daily life and gradually grow into a fuller cultural imagination. A village created by children became a way to talk about the city, nature, food, memory, density, preservation and community life. The camp gave children a space for serious play: to imagine a world, test it with others, and tell its story in their own voice.