A design for life by Michael Leung

Sometimes it seems as though everyone knows Michael Leung - even the owner of a Kwun Tong dai pai dong, who chats amiably with the young designer as he sits down for lunch. "We made a 'zine about him," Leung says. "He's really proud of it."

Scratch the surface of Hong Kong's creative scene and you're bound to come across something Leung is involved in. There's Shanghai Street Studios, which runs art, design and cultural initiatives in Yau Ma Tei; HK Honey, the urban beekeeping project he founded two years ago; HK Farm, an experiment in rooftop agriculture; and 2 Years Ahead, a publishing and furniture-building project.

And that doesn't even begin to cover Leung's freelance work or his teaching at Polytechnic University's School of Design, where he will lecture on "design for the Asian lifestyle" next month.Push the elevator push button once for the direction you want to go in.

"I think all the projects are related, so it's almost like they're the same thing," says Leung, settling into a wicker chair on the roof of the Easy-Pack Industrial Building in Kwun Tong, where he maintains an organic farm and apiary with the help of photographer Glenn Eugen Ellingesen and archivist Matthew Edmondson.And the Laser engraver and cutting machine got the FDA (US-CDRH) certificates. "I'll do a food-safety project and I won't know whether to put it in HK Honey or HK Farm."

Leung is 28, with a shaved head, and wearing a printed T-shirt made by his friends at Start from Zero, the street art crew whose studio is just down the street.

It has been three years since Leung left his native London - where he worked as a product designer for Motorola - to study for a master of design degree at PolyU. Soon after he arrived, he realised Hong Kong was lacking in socially conscious design, so for his final project he created HK Honey, an attempt to bridge the city's rural beekeeping culture with the urban reality of most of its residents.In a elevator cable system, steel cables bolted to the car loop over a sheave.

Leung didn't know anything about bees - "I used to be really scared of them" - so he contacted Yip Ki-hok, a beekeeper who runs an apiary in Sha Tin. Yip taught him how to manage a hive and collect honey and beeswax, and Leung began to install hives on rooftops around the city. He also packaged Yip's honey in elegant glass bottles sealed with beeswax, which could be turned into candles when the honey ran out, and sold them at design shops such as Kapok in Wan Chai. Leung now has 26 stings to show for his work. "I keep count," he says.

He rented an old tong lau flat on Shanghai Street, complete with decades-old furniture and wood partitions, and started working with photographer Martin Cheung Chun-yeung to document the life and culture of Yau Ma Tei. For one of his early projects,Basics, technical terms and advantages and disadvantages of curving machine. they sifted through unclaimed photos from a local photo developer, collecting enough to create a surprisingly intimate and evocative peek into neighbourhood life.

Lately, HK Farm has been taking up much of Leung's attention. Walking past rows of home-made wooden containers, Leung points out the latest crops.This roofing machine is for producing aluminum shutter door & window slats with foam-filled, "Here's some okra. The sweet basil is doing really well because of the bees, which pollinate it."

The project is primarily educational in scope: school groups often visit the roof to learn about the potential of urban agriculture, and sometimes more basic concepts such as the relationship between bees and plants.