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SingaPlural 2015: Celebration of Creative Design
A Dot on My Face by Yoko ChoiBehind every good design, there is a meticulous process that involves creativity and hard work
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A Dot on My Face by Yoko Choi
Behind every good design, there is a meticulous process that involves creativity and hard work.
SingaPlural 2015, the fourth staging of the annual event and held from March 10-15, revealed the behind-the-scenes work of design, highlighting the journey of creativity, commitment and effort that is put into creating designs.
Festival director Mervin Tan said design was often seen only in the end product, leaving the process of achieving it in the shadows.
'Under the festival theme of 'Process', we want to respond and justify why the journey should have more of a presence than the destination,' he said.
Derived from a combination of the terms 'Singular and Plural', SingaPlural, which was the anchor event of Singapore Design Week, showcased design elements from various spectra ' from advertising, architecture, urban planning and landscape to furniture and graphics.
The sense of creativity began as soon as visitors arrived in the venue, which was located in a former police station, allowing them to enjoy indoor and outdoor design experiences.
Three designers and one artist welcomed visitors with their creations under the key project of SingaPlural, called Project X: Lamitak.
In the project, each designer was given single material for exploration to create a series of lifestyle products.
'They went through various processes; they came to our warehouse, they had to know about laminate, and that was the first time they became very intimate and close with it,' said Tony Tan from Lamitak, the maker of high-pressure laminates.
A participant, Miun, presented The Marriage project where she created new species of flowers that were made from real and fake floral parts.
'I'm extracting the essence of the petals, patterns, original details in real flowers, and creating abstract laminate floral parts before fusing them together with real flower parts,' she said.
She placed the flowers in pots, jars or bottles, and turned each flower into simple, but creative ideas to decorate a room or a table.
Meanwhile, Wynk; Collaborative came up with the Pack project of colorful, water-resistant pet houses, allowing them to expand when the pets grow by changing the panel size and manually fixing them into place.
Tan explained that the concept of the Pack project was to make something that was not just for a show, but was also useful.
It might have looked simple, but the work was not as easy as it looked, he added.
'A problem that usually occurs with laminates is that if you punch a hole, it will easily crack, so you have to be really careful. It was simple, but a lot of work to make it,' he said.
Pick and Play by In Merry Motion, which created laminated party decorations, and Hundreds and Thousands a project by Tiffany Loy that made table and wall-cladding installations also showcased their creativity in transforming laminates into useful and attractive product designs.
Outside the hall, visitors crowded the backyard, enjoying the playfulness of the festival as Little Thoughts Group, a collective of Singapore-based product designers, shared their personal mementos of Singapore with their Your Hood: Singapore Urban Inspired Stories project.
Chan Wai Lim created outdoor wooden rocking furniture that was inspired by childhood memories where children played with animals and hand-made objects, while Andrew Loh showcased The Last Tiger, an outdoor mat that took inspiration from the last tiger in Singapore that was shot long ago.
Jane Tang came up with a modern set of playing stools whose forms were taken from a 1980s playground, and Rodney Loh made a bench that was inspired by his visits to the ABC Brickworks market for weekend breakfasts, and the iconic Housing Development Board flats as the starting point of his design concept.
'I wanted to capture the two-dimensional wooden planks into three dimensional modular cubes that looked like structural bricks,' he said.
SingaPlural also featured many design installations.
A colony of ants in the Big Feast installation by Joyce Loo decorated some parts of the building's wall. Loo said the installation illustrated the perseverance of ants who worked in a group to capture bigger prey.
'This inspires us to be united and persistent like the ants in order to achieve something big,' she said.
Jonathan Yuen's Let the Papers Sing to You was also an attention-grabber. He laid out papers with different surfaces that would generate sounds in various notes if people touched the papers.
RSP Architects Planners and Engineers also showcased their creation through the Dream a Little project, setting up an installation that offered visitors the experience of a dreamscape that could be enjoyed from several different perspectives.
With the breadth of design ideas presented by the designers and artists, it was a guarantee that visitors to SingaPlural would go home with a new perception of design and all of its processes.
' Photos by JP/Novia D. Rulistia
