In a year-long collaboration with Singapore Polytechnic, the Social Inclusion Project (SIP) designed the Final Year Project (FYP) of 40 graduating interior design students. By pushing students to account for homeless persons in their design of void decks, we challenged them to think critically about how design can encourage inclusion. This collaboration continues in 2022 for its second year, where we will work to further broaden students’ idea of inclusion by encouraging them to account for a variety of groups across social and economic statuses in the design of a void deck.
Through the workshops led by SIP, as well as the supervision SIP provides to students, the following learning objectives are attained:
- Understanding the socio-political contexts of insecurity and claims to space
- Developing a vision of belonging, inclusion and community in Singapore from a social perspective
- Translating this vision into design by reimagining the intersections and boundaries between public and private
- Applying an appreciation of competing interests and unavoidable trade-offs to the articulation of a design concept