A café. An experiment. A performance. In this work, audiences (customers) appreciate (or participate) by simply buying a cup of joe, just as they do in any café.
Normally, design is the supporting character in cafés, with coffee being the protagonist; but in I Know Not What Café, we try to reverse their roles. Design is brought from background to foreground, with the goal being to reveal the hidden function of design and demonstrate how it shapes our experience and even worldview.
Choose your what
a) To think
b) To do
c) To say
Choose your taste
a) Mind
b) Matter
Choose your world
a) World of sense
b) World of through
Café is usually where people take time to drink.
At I Know Not What cafe, participants take time to think.
Renatus Wu Cheuk Pan is a designer, publisher, editor and book creator. Wu has received Hong Kong Best Award by Hong Kong Designers Association Global Design Awards, Design for Asia Awards, and Tokyo TDC Annual Awards. He is the founder of Hong Kong-based design studio Edited, the independent publishing company Mosses, and an independent bookshop, Book B, with an aim to providing a platform for independent publishers and creatives to showcase and exchange.
A co-founder of the philosophy-popularising group Corrupt The Youth, Li Hong Ting studied Design at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was also host of television talk shows 哲學有偈傾 and 8花齊放.
A café. An experiment. A performance. In this work, audiences (customers) appreciate (or participate) by simply buying a cup of joe, just as they do in any café.
Normally, design is the supporting character in cafés, with coffee being the protagonist; but in I Know Not What Café, we try to reverse their roles. Design is brought from background to foreground, with the goal being to reveal the hidden function of design and demonstrate how it shapes our experience and even worldview.
1 Press ▶ to start the audio.
2 While listening to the audio, feel free to mark the points where you feel it’s either USEFUL or USELESS.
3 Remarks by other visitors have been shown along the timeline of the recording, where all USEFUL flags are at the top and USELESS flags are at the bottom.
4 The audio is sharable at specific timestamp, so your friends can jump right into the point where you find interesting and have shared.