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Orang Seletar’s Perspectives of the Tambrau Strait by Shijie
Orang Seletar’s Perspectives of the Tambrau Strait: A Field Guide to designing for the living Strait through their Objects and Practices
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Towards a Kinder City by Lo Heymans

The project explores everyday objects within the Japanese urban context - trees, baskets, benches, and bicycles, forming a network of negotiations between people and the city. It repositions the role of the designer from constructing permanent spaces to recognising the acts of temporary arrangements and adaptations by inhabitants, where space is shared through care, tolerance, and adaptability. Through sub-biological and sub-social observations, the project focuses on how human and non-human agencies continuously interact and shape one another, for instance, how trees provide rest and shade, how baskets extend businesses into the street, and how bicycles choreograph movement. These configurations are never fixed; instead, they adjust, adapt, and weave into the rhythm of daily inhabitation, representing the city’s character through the evolving relationships between human and non-human agencies. Methodologically, the project begins with on-site studies and photographic mapping of small urban gestures, object usages, and spatial arrangements, followed by drawing and diagramming to trace their spatial logic and social interactions. These visual analyses are then translated into a Toolkit of Everyday Negotiations - a series of object studies and scenarios that illustrate how kindness and coexistence are practiced spatially. By recognising the city as a parliament of things, the project argues that design operates not through control, but through recognition, care, and the shared ethics of living together.
Key Words: Negotiation, Recognition, Everyday Object, Sub-Biological, Sub-Social
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