About

The rich tapestry of interaction informs the ebb and flow of our lives.

Rough textures, soft pressure.
Musty air-conditioning, sour milk and tile grout. 
Touch and olfactory stimuli.
My earliest memories of human and spatial interaction are savage and organic in equal measure.

Free from the dictates of conscious design, guided by blind instinct.

This preface is a trivial, but necessary digression.  

Ever since completing my B.Des, in fashion design, and venturing
into various other design practices since, I have firmly believed that a return to academia would help rejuvenate and nourish my approach
to creative problem solving. Having acquired both practical,
real life experiences and exposure in related fields, it feels like
a natural next step.

After seven odd years as a graphic designer based in Singapore, I currently find myself at an impasse. Having dealt largely with traditional forms of design and design consumption, my current vocation offers little else by way of new challenges or opportunities.

Post months of extensive research and deliberation; I now stand at the doors of  The Oslo School of Architecture and Design.
This statement serves as both plea and appeal to help bring my goals
to fruition, by completing my masters in a more progressive and contemporary discipline.

An idea that took root a few years ago has since blossomed into a strong sense of purpose and knowing, that an educational immersion
is exactly what I need. I believe academic critique is indispensable in shaping vital design thinking. I wish to evolve not just as a designer, but an intuitive ideator and experiential maker of future worlds.
Via informed observation, imagination and re-interpretation.
Making the different familiar and making-new.

The Oslo School of Architecture and Design’s Masters program feels like the ideal framework, within which I can hone my design practice, and push the boundaries of co-creation. Exposing myself to a raw yet holistic, collaborative approach to design.

My childhood was spent surrounded by literature, philosophy and the arts — A steady diet of Russian authors, french philosophers and film-makers such as Satyajit Ray whetted my creative appetite.  
The value of ‘knowledge as power’ was continually impressed upon me during my formative years. However, it was only through a chance encounter with some of Paul Rand's work in College, that my fascination with graphic design began. 

To date, my strengths lie in my constant curiosity and appetite for information, my teach-ability, and a childlike openness to ideas, particularly expressed and experienced as non-linear, digital possibilities.  

While my portfolio largely comprises traditional B2B or B2C branding, packaging and identity design work– reflecting my years in a hyper-commercial design industry; I am keen to develop and expand my visual language in other mediums, both virtual and tactile.  

To make my practice more fluid - equipped adequately with navigational tools to comprehend complex environments, simplified for use in industry. In order to achieve the above, I need to refine my abilities. Coax myself out of the stagnant comfort of old ideas and expose myself to new ways of seeing, new ethics and aesthetics.

As confident as I am in my ability to express myself effectively through visual communication; bringing these concepts to life requires meticulous attention to detail and a unique, individualised understanding of the everyday world we inhabit.

This is increasingly made evident by our consumption and interaction habits. Our digital and material worlds are ruthlessly interwoven.
The environments we cohabit constantly call for seamless integration between the two.

The continual unfolding of the possibilities of virtual reality and artificial intelligence also continually alter our social fabric.

Emergent technologies, new materialities and new normals shape our movements and reform our learned behaviours. So much so, a non-digital product is conspicuous only in relation to the digital.
Or, the absence of. It is through these techno-ethnographic observations, research and interactions that I seek growth and fulfilment as a student of advanced design.

Furthermore, equipped with a masters degree in Interaction Design, and the experience and development thereof, I will be able to experiment with and produce work that provides personal meaning and value to the world, across commercial and private sectors alike.

I wish to build empathetic, thought provoking digital narratives and apply old forms of design research and enquiry to new media. To introduce the joy and satisfaction of a reflexive, responsive product to homes and commercial institutions worldwide.

I want my practice, above all, to cater to our current need-states and improve upon them, be it wellbeing, activism or agency. I have, in my years as a working professional based abroad, held an interesting assemblage of jobs and led teams both large and small. Both, locally and remotely. Through these experiences, I have learned effective methods of communication, collaboration, and ways to play to individual strengths. I have learned patience, and accountability
for my actions.

This has also allowed me to constantly evaluate what constitutes good work ethic; To enforce personal discipline and understanding while interacting effectively with peers from differing backgrounds, and socioeconomic value systems than mine.  I found this cumulatively, to be an invaluable experience, more so, as I prepare to re-enter the world of academia and professorial instruction as a mature student.

As an international applicant, AHO’s dedication to promoting and creating responsible, culturally sensitive functional experiences
that delight in improving the human condition, was critical
in my decision-making.

Sounds and images -both moving and still, architecture, interdisciplinary arts and philosophy, all inform my creative thinking. 

The issues that our patterns of digital consumption posit is of special significance to me. As a product of the internet age, I consider fondly, amongst other obvious variables (e.g - tradition) the Internet as my heritage. No longer bound within the confines of locally available art and culture, the era of 65kbps dialup marked for me a period of transformation, albeit slow and unreliable. Even in its nascent stages, I instinctively latched onto its promises of freely available information and potential for curation of experiences.

I briefly considered re-modeling this entire piece.
An exotic ten-armed goddess infusion, casual flirtations with poverty, other developing-nation oddities/woes de-rigeur. But that would be untrue – not quite my reality.

My outlier interests lie in studying the long-term psycho-social impact of the internet on our biology- the multiple personas we adopt and enact fragmented across different online platforms, its role in the dissemination of information and bias, obsessive tendencies in digital media engagement (constant online validation as reward or instant gratification) and the application of VR as a sensorial vehicle – in particular, its effects on perceptions of materiality, motion and space.

I have consciously tried to educate myself on the basics of interaction design via resources and free courses available online (edX, Coursera). Currently, I am also teaching myself Processing, for the purposes of interdisciplinary creation, generational design and responsive data visualization across 2D and 3D topographies. 

I look forward to being accepted to your program, to the possibility of shaping new worlds, and to make sense of the inexhaustible chaos of information that permeates our lives.

Thank you for your time and consideration.