HKFP is a media partner for the upcoming MaD Forum 2016: Village Reinvented. It will be held on 22-24 January, 2016.
The annual MaD Forum is an anchor project of MaD, which is an event for aspiring changemakers. It is an occasion when 1,300 participants from all over Asia gather in an intensive 2.5-day programme, to exchange thoughts for positive social change.
Last year, the theme of the forum was “Village Reimagined” and participants were asked to reimagine different realities for the places they call home. This year, the 7th edition of the forum, “Village Reinvented”, will pair up overseas changemakers with local counterparts to make ideas a reality.
The forum will consist of multi-track programmes, including villager assemblies that explore grounded practice of “village” building, studios for hands-on experience, excursions for learning in-situ, a fair for content co-creation and other platforms for peer-to-peer exchange.
Speaking at the opening will be Li Yingping, CEO of Lovely Taiwan Foundation, James Binning and Matthew Leung from Assemble Studio in the UK, and Dawn Weleski, Co-Director of Conflict Kitchen in the US.
At “Village Reimagined”, participants will explore ways to re-organize society and their lives with the solidarity and mindset of “villagers”. This will involve looking into questions of how one can build greater resilience towards the different challenges of our time, and how to innovate new systems through collaborating and showing respect to each other and other species.
Attendees will be encouraged to see themselves as collaborative villagers in an imaginary village, and gain insights for change in their home cities.
The Villagers’ Assemblies this year will consist of three segments, the Open-sourced invention society, the Civic Intervention Lab, and the Land Writing Room.
At the Civic Intervention Lab, participants will learn about how to encourage the public to bring about change in the community through creative interventions. Hong Kong Design Institute DESIS Lab for Social Design Research and DesignAge HK Club have paired up with David Serna Zulugana and Diego Cuadros Rojas from Colombia’s 100in1day to deliver the session.
