Hongkonger Rosie Chan Man-wai left school at 15 to work and support her single mother.

“I worked three jobs and thought that would be my life,” she said.

Chan, an entrepreneur in her mid-thirties, recalled how she turned her fate around.

“I’ve never given up on learning. More than a decade later, I forced my way back into education and that changed everything.”

That determination eventually brought her back to the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2020 as a senior student, where she studied Environment and Interior design.

There, she began to see design as a way to reshape systems and communities.