Tag: Singapore Culture

Local Design Culture? A view from Japan

I finally sat down and read through a borrowed copy of Kenya Hara’s Designing Design and I’m kicking myself for not getting a copy when it was still available. It’s sold out everywhere now and I’m waiting for a reprint. In a chapter where he attempts to define Japan’s design culture, the Japanese designer likens his country’s location to the platform of a pachinko game, a form of pinball that is upright.

He wrote:

“Japan, catching such a great variety of diverse cultures via multiple routes, was probably a very tangled cultural locus. Accepting all and continually shouldering the chaos, quite the reverse of what one might expect, created an extreme hybrid that amalgamated them all in one breath. That is to say, perhaps our ancestors came up with the idea of stopping them all in their tracks, negating them with the utmost simplicity: zero.”

If you think about it, this unique geographical location that Kenya is describing sounds very much like Singapore. We are also at the crossroads of many different cultures. The exception is our ancestor’s response has not been to “negate them with the utmost simplicity”. But I wouldn’t say we have gone the other extreme to create a “hybrid that amalgamated them all”.

What we seemed to have done is to manage the cultures separately, keeping them apart and producing designs that hark back to the respective cultures, or something like this when we need to address everyone:

At times, we also defer to our common/working language and culture, English, producing designs that fall in line with global aesthetics. I am not against globalisation but I just wonder what happens when we allow more flux amongst our people and in their expression? Again, Kenya covers this issue with a lucid explanation:

“I am not writing from a standpoint of anti-globalisation. It’s been a long, long time since the onset of active international exchange, it would be nonsense today to insist on the idiosyncrasies of individual cultures. I simply believe it must be meaningful to be conscious of the part of Japan that’s capable of contributing to universal values.”

You got to read this book if you haven’t. Not available at bookstores anymore, but you can still borrow it from the library.

 

Singapore’s New Creatives Mediascape

The world of content creation is changing, and I was reminded of this after reading The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism, and watching the documentary PressPausePlay this week. Both pieces of work touched upon how the digital era was changing not only how content was created, but also who was doing so and what was being produced.

This can be seen in Singapore’s media scene, which has traditionally been dominated by Singapore Press Holdings and Mediacorp. Both produce content for newspapers, magazines, television and radio — the traditional mediums of communication. They derive their revenue mainly from the content they produced, depending heavily on advertisers, as well as subscribers.

Not so for a new breed of media producers in Singapore. Besides individual bloggers, there seems to be an increasing list of publications produced by teams of people in the genre of lifestyle, arts, and culture. Take a look at Actually Magazine, a website on lifestyle and culture. The people behind it? The owners of fashion stores ACTUALLY…, ActuallyActually and Very Wooonderland. Then, there’s POSKOD.SG, an online magazine about modern Singapore that was started by a branding agency Studio Wong Huzir.

Besides starting publications online, some of these new media producers have also entered the world of print too. Branding agency kult has released the sixth issue of its illustration magazine of the same name, while design studio HJGHER is on its second issue of its lifestyle publication Underscore Magazine. Anonymous, started by the designers at SILNT, have also embarked on Bracket, a magazine that features the thoughts of some of the best minds in today’s creative world.

The one thing that is common about all these publications? None of them actually make a living off it. Instead, they are often passion projects of local creative-base companies who fund the publications with what they earn from their core business, which isn’t media. As The Story So Far notes:

“If the old formula of “adjacency” — selling ads and commercials alongside content — is fading, what will replace it? There are many possibilities, but few are likely, on their own, to provide the stream of dollars that advertising and circulation once did.”

While these publications may not earn their publishers money, there are other benefits. It is a vehicle of getting your brand out to a larger audience, creating something that expresses your values and beliefs. Both Underscore and Bracket have enabled their Singapore founders to be known overseas after the publications snagged awards and accolades.

Having their own publication also helps cultivate audiences and markets, especially if it is small and undefined. This is probably why government boards have also created their own online publications such as the National Heritage Board’s Yesterday.sg and the National Art Gallery’s The Canvas to promote their respective causes.

But it’s not just commercial companies that are redefining Singapore’s mediascape. There are also groups of Singaporeans who have harnessed the ease of publishing nowadays to pursue their own interests, forking out of their own time and money. One of the oldest must be The Flying Inkpot, a theatre and dance review that has been around since 1996. For film buffs, there is SINdie, which reports on Singapore’s independent film scene, literary lovers can turn to Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Ceriph, while academics and critical thinkers can try out the multidisciplinary e-journal s/pores.

The magazines I have listed here are only just a small sampling of what there is out there. If you know of others I may have missed out, do let me know!

Singapore Visual Archive

Been busy of late with several projects on hand, some to keep me going financially, some to keep myself challenged, and others just because I’m excited about them. Here’s one that will be on-going for a long time to come: