2025
8 Weeks
Education - Tutor
8 Weeks
Education - Tutor
Students from the BA (Hons) Design for Social Futures (DSF) at LASALLE College of the Arts, University of the Arts Singapore explore the climate vulnerability of an island city. They examine the potential impacts on coastal resilience in the context of marine heatwaves and rising sea levels, especially in the age of A.I. The outcome was exhibited during the Singapore Design Week 2025 at National Design Centre.
Visitors are invited to view various worlds constructed by the students through a deliberate and creative presentation of fictional artefacts and diegetic prototypes. These envisioned futures cover different time horizons and are approached from innovative, speculative, or critical angles.
Weight of the Catch
Designed by Tiew Fang Kee
Is your seafood really affordable? Weigh your seafood to find out its true cost. Discover how your consumption habits can either drive ocean degradation or recovery. Sometimes it's not just about what we pay at the cashier, it's what the ocean pays for us.
Invasive Bites
Designed by Tee Ling Wah
A transformative hawker store reimagines the Golden Apple Snail, an invasive species in Singapore’s waters, into a unique hawker delicacy. From Shell Popiah to Snail Satay, tradition and resilience come together on the plate. What was once a pest is now a nutrient-rich ingredient, addressing the challenges of Singapore’s fragile food security.
In a nation open to novel food possibilities, can overlooked abundance become tomorrow’s staple?
Plastic Isn't Forever
Designed by Tan Yee Jing
Step into a speculative lab where future materials are imagined and tested. Mangrove algae, one day grown alongside restored habitats such as Singapore’s upcoming Mandai Mangrove and Mudflat Nature Park, is explored as an alternative to everyday plastics, opening possibilities for a world where what we create can return to nature.
Learning the Ocean's Language
Designed by Nur Aliyah Binte Mohammad Noor Azman
By 2035, children grow up fluent in marine forecasting. In this playroom, weather is not memorized but felt. Here, young minds learn that the movements of fish or the stillness of sea cucumbers can signal tomorrow’s conditions. Toys become tools, and bedtime stories become training. This space invites you to imagine how weather literacy might evolve—playful, sensory, and embedded in everyday life. What if every child could read the ocean like a book?
Tidewatchers
Designed by Nigel Sng Wei Jian
Tidewatchers cast lines into polluted waters using reactive lures shaped with textures drawn from nature. These lures don’t catch life, they reveal what threatens it. Dressed in custom outfits, Tidewatchers retrieve each transformed lure in quiet reflection. Each catch becomes a record, tracing the fading line between land and sea, memory and displacement.
Still Waters
Designed by Elijah Chia
Still Waters offers a gentle farewell for both loved ones and the coast’s cleanliness. Instead of cremation and scattering ashes into the sea, we focus on aquamation and replanting seagrass meadows. In this serene resting place, memories grow, held not in stone but in the meadows, where every goodbye becomes beautifully alive.
The Melted Menagerie
Designed by Bridget Lim
Set within the curated space of a taxidermist’s shop, this exhibition explores the transformative impact of rising sea levels on animal evolution. Reimagined skeletal forms reveal how species might morph to survive extreme environments, each specimen telling a speculative story of adaptation, extinction, and resilience in a world reshaped by environmental collapse.
Water: Reimagined
Designed by Andrea Lau Yi Xuan
Imagine a Singapore where water springs from the sea—naturally purified by mangroves.
Grov transforms this quiet coastal magic into fresh, drinkable water. Among the round shelves of origami bottles, explore resilience, transformation, and the genius of nature.
Grov transforms this quiet coastal magic into fresh, drinkable water. Among the round shelves of origami bottles, explore resilience, transformation, and the genius of nature.
Green. Resilient. Original. Vital. Sip the impossible.
Plankware
Designed by Cheong Wen Xuan
Plankware is invisible wellness woven into daily life.
No pills. No powders. No apps. This lifestyle flatware delivers essential nutrients like vitamin A, omega-3, and phytoplankton-derived antioxidant through the act of eating. Completely undetectable in taste or smell, it’s perfect for that one picky-eater friend or fussy toddlers.
No routines changed. Just health integrated in the ritual we love most: eating.
Rising Returns
Designed by Masha Nyanna Wee Junyadi
In 2050, the sea took the world.
In 2100, her mind went with the tides.
In 2100, her mind went with the tides.
Now at 70, Yara Wee lives in a flooded future, battling memory loss and rising tides. Through RE:CAP, an AI-powered time capsule, she relives fragments of her submerged youth.
In "Rising Returns", sit in Yara's shoes and immerse yourself with the headphones provided, as this speculative installation explores aging, identity, and what endures when both land and self begin to fade.
Adapting to Future Oceans - Corals
Designed by Aveline Ang Swee Leng
Climate change is rewriting the story of our oceans—corals are bleaching, ecosystems are shifting, and survival hangs in the balance. But not all hope is lost. Some corals are quietly adapting, evolving in ways we’re just beginning to understand. Through a fictional marine biologist’s desk, this project uncovers clues to the future of coral life—and its fight to endure.
Special Thanks
Dr. Sandric Leong, Lead Researcher, Tropical Marine Science Institute, NUS
Clive van Heerden and Jack Mama, Founders, vHM Design Futures
Matthew Wong, Founder, StudioWongs
Wendy Chua, Programme Leader, DSF
Edmund Zhang, Co-tutor, DSF
Clive van Heerden and Jack Mama, Founders, vHM Design Futures
Matthew Wong, Founder, StudioWongs
Wendy Chua, Programme Leader, DSF
Edmund Zhang, Co-tutor, DSF