Tag: food and design

By Design: SINGAPORE

What is design? This is a question that frequently popped up when putting together this publication. Many of our interviewees expressed (pleasant) surprise to be featured in a “design” publication, while some designers were sceptical about including less than professional work. Underlying these reactions is an assumption that “design” is extra (ordinary) and can only be created by those trained in it. This has led to the popular view that there are chairs, and then there are “designer” chairs—a binary view we seek to reframe with By Design: SINGAPORE.

Our compilation of 10 stories challenges the belief that design is only a stylish product and a tool for innovation. While such points of views have propelled its meteoric rise with industrialisation, design is ultimately a creative act necessary for living. We all carry this out when trying to overcome challenges in the environment. As the American design writer, Ralph Caplan, once wrote: “[D]esign is a process for making things right, for shaping what people need.” This was from his 1982 book, By Design, whose name we borrowed the name for our publication.

Another inspiration is from where we come from: the city-state of Singapore. In a speech to design students in 2018, its Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong explained that: “Singapore is a nation by design. Nothing we have today is natural, or happened by itself. Somebody thought about it, made it happen.” Designers in Singapore have no doubt contributed to this. We highlight some unexpected examples, including a prosthetic for a hornbill, several restored historic buildings and the effort to build high-tech “tropical” data centres. But we are also interested in how the rest of Singapore society has harnessed design as a process. For instance, local food hawkers have crafted new tools to prepare traditional delicacies for modern times, while its food technologists are inventing fresh ways of repackaging Singapore cuisine to the world.

In examining design as broadly as possible, By Design: Singapore shows how design is everywhere around us. It can be stylish. It can be innovative. But more than a consumer product or invention, design is an action each of us can take to make an impact on the world.

The publication was supported by the DesignSingapore Council and was first published for the Singapore Design Week 2019.

Concept: In Plain Words
Design: Modular Unit

The 10 stories:

  1. A City for Nature
  2. A Vernacular Sign Language by Vikas Kailankaje
  3. Huat Ah!
  4. The Future of a City’s Past by Stephanie Peh
  5. New Ways, Familiar Tastes by Sheere Ng
  6. We Make This City by Don Wong
  7. Science of the Secondary: Rubber Band by Atelier HOKO
  8. Cooling Down This Hot Island by Timothy Misir
  9. Housing Singapore’s Smart Nation
  10. Consider the Wok by Sheere Ng

Welcoming Tomorrow’s Hawker Centres

While I type these words on my laptop at a hawker centre, I can’t help but notice the uncles looking over from the next table. They are not the only ones. Passersby stare curiously, including the cleaner who slows down whenever she pushes her trolley by.

Maybe it’s how my sleek laptop stands out from the gaudy mustard table. Or how I had casually plonked this shiny aluminum slab on a plastic surface stained by kopi and teh. As the only customer using a laptop in the hawker centre, I stand out like a sore thumb. My back certainly feels that way from sitting on the stiff stool.

➜ Read the full column in CUBES #85 (April/May 2017)

The Design of Sharing Food in a Connected World

Halal Gummy Bears (in green) were laid out among non-Halal ones at the Eating Together exhibition to challenge visitors to consider the care they needed to take in eating among others with dietary restrictions. A visitor pointed out how vegetarians were excluded from this installation because gummy bears contain beef gelatin. PHOTO: Clarence Aw
Halal Gummy Bears (in green) were laid out among non-Halal ones at the Eating Together exhibition to challenge visitors to consider the care they needed to take in eating among others with dietary restrictions. A visitor pointed out how vegetarians were excluded from this installation because gummy bears contain beef gelatin. PHOTO: Clarence Aw

It is the simplest of features found on many food packaging. A tear, a jagged edge, or a perforated line—a godsend to anyone who has struggled to open a packet of chips. These designs conveniently replace the need for brute force, and are considerate gestures from food manufacturers that have thought carefully about how we eat.

Eating, or the journey that food takes to get into our mouths (and even within our bodies), is a logistical issue many of us take for granted. This global movement of crops and livestock, from a farm through a processing facility, to a market, into a kitchen, on a dining table, and finally, entering as food inside our stomachs, is one facilitated by design at every turn. We don’t have to travel far to see examples: start with the plate, spoon, and fork, on the dining table, the most ubiquitous tools the world eats with today. They stand in for our bare hands and function in ways we cannot. Plates divide food into portions, spoons let us sip hot soup, while forks help us pick out the tiniest of ingredients.

➜ Read the rest of the essay at Design Observer