Kiasu Design Life

18: Chat with Alistair - Designing migrant workers' home 🏡 away from home

Episode Summary

We sat down with Alistair who gave us a glimpse of a story less told in Singapore - designing the living spaces of migrant workers. If they tirelessly help us build our homes, then someone ought to help them build theirs, even if it's temporal. That's where Alistair and Agency came in. It was such an eye-opening chat that we're super excited to share this with everyone else! Hope you enjoy this. 😌

Episode Notes

We sat down with Alistair who gave us a glimpse of a story less told in Singapore - designing the living spaces of migrant workers. If they tirelessly help us build our homes, then someone ought to help them build theirs, even if it's temporal. That's where Alistair and Agency came in. It was such an eye-opening chat that we're super excited to share this with everyone else! Hope you enjoy this. 😌

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Timestamp:

(00:00) Intro

(01:20) About Alistair & Brief (not underwear)

(05:49) How the project started and problem space

(10:33) Reductive terms: "Dorms" and "Migrant Workers" 

(13:15) Running through the design process 

(15:17) Ali's observation of dormitories and eye-openers

(24:49) Post-research: How the team synthesizes problems and observations

(29:46) 3 big guiding design principles to harmonize solutions 

(36:54) More solutions that was prototyped

(46:48) Post-project checkpoints

(47:55) Dormitory managers, owners, and Google ratings?!

(53:28) Summary & what's next

(56:37) What's keeping Ali excited these days

(59:20) Ali's GTMS

(01:03:45) Adilah's GTMS

(01:08:20) Hsuan's GTMS

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Notes/references we made in this episode:

Alistair's GTMS: Oasis@Outram

Adilah's GTMS: Behavioural Sink Theory

Hsuan's GTMS: 12 Favourite Problems

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Behind the voices:

Alistair - Brief | LinkedIn

Adilah - Website | LinkedIn

Hsuan - Website | LinkedIn