Memory Lanes - A Speculative Installation
A collaboration with Cynthia Wu, Adrian Chin Quan, Alice Sun, Nicole Ao Leong and Angie Huang.
Memory Lanes is a speculative installation project situated in Singapore’s Kampong Glam as part of the UTS Global Design Studio. It is a conceptual contemporary street installation consisting of three laneways (one modelled here) transformed into living installations featuring culturally and historically significant iconography and symbols. Alongside lighting and sound, it creates an immersive experience that draws in the youth of Singapore to engage and learn about the Malay culture.
Credits to Nicole and Angie for constructing model
During the studio, we explored Singapore’s culture and living heritage and had to identify and propose a solution to an issue whilst on site. Driven heavily on process and conceptual development, involving rounds of mapping, interviewing and active observation, the team identified that Singapore’s youths were disconnected from their rich culture and history (Malays included).
Credits to Nicole and Angie for constructing model
We further identified that Kampong Glam today is largely driven by tourism and hipster culture adding to the disconnect between place and living heritage, culture & history.
Instead, we re-framed the problem as part of our solution, keying into the social media driven culture as an opportunity to teach and engage people with Malay culture.
Digital sketch for the scale of the installation
Being a speculative project, most of the time was spent teasing out ideas and understanding the problem space. To manage this, mapping techniques were used to not only initially capture the space but to also distill and re-frame the space.
