Designing for People, Cities, and Creative Resistance



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Gracia (she/her) is a designer and researcher currently based in New York City. Her multidiscplinary practice designs for & with those most impacted by design processes. Read more






Not-So-Public Public: Soft Interventions

Final Year Project
LASALLE College of the Arts


Year: 2021

Expanding upon the research surrounding the Residents’ Kit, Not-So-Public Public is a provocative design project that challenges the politicisation of public space planning in Singapore by highlighting the Singaporean's predominant role as consumer over citizen in society. Beyond its physical structure, public spaces are complex products of political, social, cultural agencies, constructed through historical processes and the lived experiences of people. 

In Singapore, apathetic attitudes towards politics and civic engagement can be linked to overtly functional urban planning that has conditioned people to produce dominant rules of social behaviour.

Citizen participation has only been recently recognised as an impactful platform to include communities in the shaping of the urban environment. However, despite attempts, decades of non-participation have conditioned citizens to be apathetic & skeptical towards community participation.

Soft Interventions was inspired by the urban hacktivism movement, a citizen-led, creative method of recreating public space often in a “do-it-yourself” style. 

A series of five objects were created to reinvent the use of everyday public spaces. “Soft” in this sense refers not only to the materiality of the objects but also referring to its impermanence; a reference to the tracelessness of Singapore’s urban environment.






Catalog of Inclusion and Exclusion

The Catalog of Inclusion & Exclusion is an online collection of third spaces, laws & policies and physical artefacts that act as active actors in influencing the inclusion and exclusion of particular communities. 



To access the Catalog, one needs to complete the “National Social Survey” where the user is profiled and information is restricted depending on their personal profiles. This exercise of empathy acts as a reflection of how one’s social identity is inevitably linked to their belonging in the city.