From Craft to Industry: Reflecting on Histories of Making in Singapore

Four exhibitions retracing Singapore's craft, design and manufacturing history (L-R): Tools That Built Singapore, Made in Singapore Products, FIFTY Years of Singapore Design and Craft | Singapore.
Four Exhibitions (L-R): Tools That Built Singapore, Made in Singapore Products, Fifty Years of Singapore Design and Craft | Singapore.

“Made in Singapore” has always been a challenging term for Singaporeans. Manufacturers grumble about the high costs of labour and land here. Designers lament the lack of expert collaborators willing to experiment and innovate. Consumers complain about paying a premium for local products that are no better than overseas imports.

Four on-going exhibitions in Singapore coincidentally retrace the nation’s history of making, offering an opportunity to understand and reflect on some of the issues that plague craft, design and manufacturing in the city-state today.

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How One Couple Turned a Graphic Design Hobby into a Major Modernist Collection

Examples of Swiss Style design from the Display collection

They collect books, magazines, posters, and ephemera for inspiration just like many other graphic designers, but Kind Company’s Greg D’Onofrio and Patricia Belen aren’t your average graphic design hoarders.

Their collection of book jackets by American designer Alvin Lustig, ads for Milanese tire company Pirelli, and classic design periodicals like the Swiss Typographische Monatsblätter are just a slice of the mid 20th-century graphic design the duo have amassed over a decade. With over 3,000 pieces of works housed within drawers, archival boxes, and bookshelves stored inside their 650-square-foot home office on the Upper East Side of New York City, the couple have literally built a house for modern graphic design.

➜ Read the rest at AIGA’s Eye on Design

Vote For Me! Singapore Elections Ephemera

TDSJ-Vote-For-Me

Singapore’s 11th General Elections since independence marks the beginning of a design-conscious politics—a 2011 essay I wrote for The Design Society Journal No. 03.

The day after Nicole Seah was officially presented as an election candidate for the National Solidarity Party (NSP), The New Paper asked on its cover: “Do looks matter in elections?” It was directed at the online buzz generated after the 24 year-old Seah first announced over Facebook that she was standing for elections. Netizens were clearly taken in by her profile picture—what the paper described as “lovely flowing hair, make-up and her good side showing”—so much so that nobody bothered who she was contesting with in Marine Parade Group Representation Constituency (GRC). Some even began dubbing NSP as the “Nicole Seah Party”. Soon, digitally edited pictures of her as Wonder Woman and Scarlett in the upcoming G.I. Joe movie also began making their rounds online.

However, Seah, in her own words, was not just “another pretty face”. She was confident and articulate, making astute remarks during her campaign trail. This, plus her good looks, projected the image of an attractive and credible candidate to voters. Just over a fortnight after starting her Facebook page, Seah received even more ‘Likes’ than the nation’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew, earning her the title of Singapore’s most popular politician. Despite this, her NSP team did not win the election battle at Marine Parade. Yet, by garnering so much attention and winning 43.36 per cent of the votes against a People’s Action Party team led by former prime minister Goh Chok Tong, Seah’s campaign demonstrated how image played a part in helping a young unknown like her win votes.

This echoes the 2008 presidential election in the United States, when a relatively newcomer Barack Obama “crafted a meticulous visual strategy”, that helped propel him to victory. While Seah and the other candidates of Singapore’s 11th General Election did not display the sophistication of Obama’s visual campaign—right down to choosing an appropriate typeface—they produced one of the most visually-driven election in recent Singapore history, heralding the beginnings of Obama-style politics in the future.

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