In today’s society, the fear of failure is often attributed to societal pressure, fear of judgement, and high self-imposed or societal expectations. As a result, failure has become stigmatised. “Not Today Failure” is a project that addresses this fear through a guided journal filled with insights from the designer, short comics, and writing prompts. The project’s goal is to educate and inspire readers to take the first steps towards overcoming their fear of failure in a genuine and engaging way.
Nostalgia, the bittersweet yearning for the past, is a universal feeling that transcends time and culture. Nostalgia: Rose Tinted Glasses is a zine that aims to investigate and explain why this feeling exists, how to better comprehend the nature of nostalgia, while documenting my own experiences with it.
Singapore is renowned as a food haven, largely due to our hawker foods. However, with the city-state’s rapid digitalisation and growth, it has become increasingly challenging to preserve the traditional hawker culture. Consequently, it is likely that hawker centres in Singapore will undergo significant changes, and the cultural landscape of hawker culture will inevitably shift in the near future. To combat this, this project’s main objective will be to archive and document hawker centres through the eyes of locals, with the aim of preserving the rich culture that these hawker centres embody.
By exploring the subtleties and nuances of hawker centres across the city-state, this project hopes to uncover the true essence of hawker culture in Singapore. This will not only foster a sense of identity amongst the local community but also serve to celebrate the unique hawker culture that has flourished in Singapore for generations. By documenting and archiving the cultural significance of these hawker centres, the project aims to preserve this vibrant part of Singapore’s heritage for future generations to appreciate and cherish.
More Than Meets The Eye explores the dog-eat-dog society where people often make superficial judgements, landing themselves in difficult situations. The animalistic trait of ‘camouflage’ is used as a metaphor for the notion of prey vs predator, which mirrors the societal structure of human life. The motifs of prey and predator were curated through the basis of similarity, creating an illusory experience that demonstrates the unassumingly contradictory nature of these similar patterns.
The patterns seem to blend together uniformly from a distance, but closer inspection reveals each animal’s true form. The stripes of a tiger and the stripes of a zebra camouflaged among each other, yet their purposes are different — one uses it to hide, while the other uses it to hunt. It prompts people to reflect upon their own circumstances and serves as a reminder to be wary of their surroundings. In the dog-eat-dog world, you might not know who the real enemy is — to look closely.
The sudden shift of tertiary design education from the physical to virtual space was made necessary
during the COVID-19 pandemic. This created a flurry and growth of digital resources for online teaching and
learning; but due to the short span of time, there was a lack of expertise in streamlining the most relevant
resources online for remote design educators. In addition to that, there is a challenge to recreate a similar
level of social interaction and collaboration that goes on in physical studio sessions, that is vital to the
reiteration process of design projects.
stvdio is designed as a digital product platform for design educators, meant to help recommend a
plethora of collaborative resources, provide suggestions on how to utilise them strategically, and raise
discourse about how to best take advantage of educational technology.
