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to belong. jimmy ONG
Some engagement systems are effective because the operator’s work is to design the conditions in which participants engage with one another, and then to make space for that engagement to take its own shape.
Co-creation is a form of engagement in which participants build relationships through repeated actions over time, with the operator designing and safeguarding the environment. The organizer doesn’t host the experience but acts as the architect of the space—creating the room, shaping the table, and setting the pace. Ultimately, the engagement is driven by the people involved.
The contributors in this group operate at very different scales and in diverse ways.
Jimmy Ong creates artistic projects via long-term collaborations with artisans, where the process and relationships are integral parts of the artwork, and the work can’t be produced in isolation.
Yuki Yamagishi welcomes guests into her Hong Kong kitchen, transforming cooking and serving into engaging, participatory experiences. She organizes the space and program, teaching guests, encouraging them to serve each other, and fostering a brief, dynamic community that frequently extends beyond the event.
Cheng Hoo Peh oversees the Kreta Ayer Community Centre in Singapore, where residents take on volunteer roles and programs are driven by user input rather than external planners.
Ryo Yamazaki bases his practice on the idea of withdrawal; his rural-revival initiatives in Osaka are designed so that the community can thrive independently, with success defined by the project’s capacity to sustain itself without his involvement.
Each of these contributors performs the same role at different scales. They create the conditions that enable others to engage and then step back so that engagement can take place. Their discipline is one of facilitation — knowing what not to design, direct, or perform themselves, so that participants can conduct the engagement independently.
This form of engagement most effectively resists measurement.
A robust co-creation system enables the operator to step back while engagement continues. This continuous participation is hard to measure instantly and cannot be summarized by one metric. Instead, it shows itself through repeated visits, inviting others, taking on additional roles beyond what the operator assigned, and shaping future iterations from within the system. These indicators are subtle, develop gradually, and build up over time, leading to results that no operator-driven effort could produce directly.