Hong Kong's vibrant street life lures Yale professor back for second visit

The vibrant street life in Hong Kong is just one of the reasons Yale graphic design professor Sheila Levrant de Bretteville is drawn to the city.

She has, for the second time, arrived as a visiting scholar at the Hong Kong Design Institute where she will remain until the end of the year. Her first visit to the institute, which is run by the Vocational Training Council, was in 2010.

With studios, classrooms and gallery lining the wide passageway - called the design boulevard - leading to the main entrance in Tiu Keng Leng, the school runs higher diploma programmes for various specialities, including architectural, visual communication, product, interior and exhibition design.

Levrant de Bretteville founded the first design programme for women at the California Institute of the Arts in 1971, and in 1990 she became the first woman to receive tenure at the Yale school of art, when she was named director of graduate studies in graphic design.

Known these days as the "Street Professor", as in the name of her endowed professorship at Yale, Levrant de Bretteville became fond of the hustle and bustle of life in Hong Kong and the protests staged by people from all walks of life. One of her goals while she is here is to alert students to the what is happening around them.

That was the motivation behind her invitation of long-time friend Wyss Wai-shu Yim, an adjunct professor at Chinese University's Institute of Space and Earth Information Science, to give a lecture on a topic seemingly unrelated to design education - sea level changes and future coastal development of Hong Kong.

"Design education is not only about the transfer of knowledge; I am not here for that. I am here to help them learn by them doing things, researching things, finding things and paying attention to what they see," says Levrant de Bretteville.