Originally from Sydney, Ben McCarthy earned a Bachelor of Industrial Design degree from the University of New South Wales. He has worked as a freelance designer in Sydney, before moving to London where he worked at the studio of British designer Tom Dixon. He came to Hong Kong in 2007 and has been working with celebrated industrial designer Michael Young. In 2009, McCarthy was the winner of the Australian Council for the Arts Milan residency gran, and has exhibited at the Milan Furniture Fair for the past two years. Last year he took part in Hong Kong’s Butcher’s Deluxe design exhibition and staged a solo exhibition, ‘Late Nights and Weekends’, at Object Gallery, Sydney.

Billy Potts and Joseph Ng are the founders of Hong Kong’s Handsome Bag Company, a unique design firm that takes parts from old taxis and repurposes them to create new products. To date, the firm has created totes from upholstery ripped from old seats and a chair from the car’s structural elements. A Hong Kong-based architect and designer, Ng graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008 and won second-runner up in the Hong Kong Open Academy Award ‘Chair’ Competition organised by Hong Kong Ambassadors of Design in 2010. Potts has a background in law and shares designing duty with Ng for the company, with a utilitarian design aesthetic emphasising high functionality while maintaining conceptual substance. His work has dealt with the importance of local production and craft, local culture, urban environment and environmental sustainability.

Swedish designer David Ericsson has a Masters degree in engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He worked as a mechanical design engineer for Zenit Design Group, working with clients such as Sony Ericsson, Precise Biometrics and Vidilux. In Hong Kong, Ericsson is the founder of Void International, a design consultancy firm, predominantly working with Europe-based clients. Ericsson also designs, produces and markets his own products, such as Void watches, and is also a co-founder and designer for Hong Kong-based lifestyle brand Squarestreet. He is a regular lecturer on product design at the Hong Kong PolyU and conducts student critiques at the Hong Kong University school of architecture.

After studying design at the Kanazawa College of Art, Jin Kuramoto worked as an in-house designer for a major electronics manufacturer working on a variety of lifestyle products such as mobile phones, personal computers and homeware. From 2003 to 2007, he designed with the Fat design collective and in 2008, he founded his eponymous studio. The firm has received numerous awards, including the IF Design award, the Good Design award the Toyama product design competition. His works — Rock, Life Chair and Tea Set — have helped Kuramoto carve a name for himself in Japan’s highly competitive design industry. He also regularly lectures at Keio University and the Kyoto University of Art and Design.