Coming from a city that never sleeps, I've grown up with a fast-paced, round the clock and immediate lifestyle. In Hong Kong, you barely have to wait for anything. Miss the train? Doesn't matter, the next will arrive within 2 minutes. Hungry at 4 in the morning? Order take-away and it arrives at your doorstep within 20 minutes. I would say I've taken this kind of lifestyle for granted and never really saw it as something worth taking note of.. until I moved to London.
Many people would say London is incredible... life is on high-speed and things can't be done any quicker, you can't get from one place to the other any faster.. and when I tell them that actually, London only really functions at what I would say around 70% of the speed of Hong Kong they look at me as if I'm completely out of my mind. Truth is, London was relatively slow for me when I first moved there. I couldn't believe how long I had to wait for buses, how long it took for my food to arrive, how long it took to pay for something. But it seems like I've slowly grown accustomed to the speed, slowly adapted to having more patience.
Now that I'm back at home I realize how serious this high-speed syndrome actually is. The day I arrived in Hong Kong, I was again amazed at the time it took for me to land, get off the plane, get through customs and reach the baggage hall. Normally this would take around 10 to 20 minutes depending on where the gate was. I reached the baggage hall well within 15 minutes and expected to be leaving with my baggage in the next 10 minutes or so. When I reached the conveyor belt, there was already a sign saying "BA27- Baggage delays due to technical problems. We apologize for any inconveniences caused". Compared to my nightmare in heathrow 5 days ago when I waited with no announcements at all for 10 hours for my "delayed" flight which never even happened at the end, this was literally like heaven. It took the airport staff less than 10 minutes to get their act together and inform passengers of the delay.. of their BAGGAGES.
10 minutes passed and the conveyor belt was still empty. An announcement about baggage delays was made soon after but people were already starting to get impatient. Eventually after almost an hour of waiting, we were informed that they are still having problems and that we should leave our contacts and the baggages would be sent to us to our home address. I thought to myself... well, luckily I have most of what I need either on me or at home anyway.. so a week without my baggage should be fine. It was then that I overheard one of the airport staff telling passengers that their luggage should be sent to them by midnight or tomorrow morning at the latest. I was so surprised I thought I heard the wrong thing. If this were London, my baggages would get to me in 2 weeks if I were lucky. So I happily filled in my details and left the airport, feeling blessed that I'm home again at the worlds most efficient city. But actually, this was just the beginning. As everyone knows about BA, there's always a delay with them. Flights, baggage, whatever. So although they said they'd deliver by midnight or the next morning, everyone doubted it would actually happen. And it didn't.. my baggage arrived around 30 hours after my arrival. But during those 30 hours, my mum was constantly calling BA to ask when my baggage would be arriving and my dad was constantly complaining about their poor management. This whole situation even managed to get itself on the news where people complained that their baggage weren't delivered to them within the expected time frame! I almost couldn't believe it... whether Hong Kong has evolved into some insatiable and spoilt city or whether I have just regressed and expected less out of this so-called "efficiency" of a city.. I'm not sure.
But this whole personal experience has made me think about what I would like to write for my contextual report. Thinking about the 24-hour society, how has this made an impact on lifestyles and consequently on design itself? Has the development of the 24-hour society been the outcome of human's never-ending demands and is design feeding this act of over-demanding and over-consuming lifestyle?
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