Design Ah! Experience the Wonder of Everyday
On Noticing Things: M+'s New Exhibition Asks You to Look Again at Everything You've Stopped Seeing
There's a game I play in airports, which is to say, I play it constantly, where I try to catch the exact moment a piece of design disappears into habit. The yellow tactile paving that steers you toward the gate. The particular curve of an armrest that stops you from lying down (by design, always by design). The moment you stop ‘seeing’ the object and simply use it is, paradoxically, the moment the design has done its job.
M+ in Hong Kong is currently doing something rather lovely with this idea. Design Ah! Experience the Wonder of Everyday Design opens on 27 June 2026 and runs through January 2027 — and it is, at its core, an exercise in making you notice things again.
The exhibition is adapted from ‘Design Ah! Neo’, a children's educational television programme made by NHK in Japan, which is precisely the pedigree you want for something like this. The Japanese have a specific genius for turning the ordinary into the exquisite, for finding the three-hundred-year design history inside a chopstick, and this exhibition leans into that sensibility without being precious about it. Twenty-one stations, ten daily actions: walking, eating, sitting. The kind of things you do without thinking, until someone asks you to think about them, and then suddenly you can't stop.
Perfektron, School-Chair Dreams (2025). Installation view of Design Ah! Exhibition neo, TOKYO NODE, 2025. Photo: Satoshi Asakawa
What I find genuinely compelling about the framing is the insistence that design is not decoration but relationship, between your hand and an object, between an object and your behaviour, between your behaviour and the city around it. Some of the stations reference Hong Kong's visual environment and culinary culture specifically, which feels right. Design that ignores context is just styling.
The broader point the exhibition makes, and it makes it through play, which is the correct way to make it, is that someone, somewhere, sat down and thought carefully about every object you have ever used without a second thought. The toothbrush. The traffic light. The bus handle.
That thinking is embedded in the object, invisible until you go looking for it. At which point you say, well, ‘Ah’.M+ is an extraordinary building for this kind of encounter, Herzog & de Meuron's Victoria Harbourfront behemoth, with its thirty-three galleries and that vast LED facade, which will run a companion commission of short videos nightly from 26 June through early October. A museum-as-city-screen is a strange and impressive thing. It suits an exhibition about how design shapes public behaviour rather well.
Tomohiro Okazaki, Flock of Handles (2025). Installation view of Design Ah! Exhibition neo, TOKYO NODE, 2025. Photo: Satoshi Asakawa
Family Days run on the last two Sundays of each month from June through December, and there is a summer day camp situation for children who want to go further. But honestly? This one is for everyone who's ever picked up a well-designed object and felt, without quite knowing why, that the world was briefly in order. Go notice things.
Design Ah! Experience the Wonder of Everyday Design runs 27 June 2026 – 10 January 2027 at M+, West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong.
