Categorie: Works

Ideactio Projects

This page captures a collection of projects that I worked on during my work as studio lead & service designer at Ideactio, from 2018 to 2021. My role for each of the projects is listed accordingly. The copyright of all projects belongs to Ideactio.

What if you walked into a store to buy 2 shirts, and walked out more confident than you came in?

Role: Project lead & service designer

Everybody buys clothes. For most men, this is a transactional experience: you leave the store after successfully buying the 2 shirts you came for. But what if you could leave a store feeling more confident than when you came in? Through a co-design process, we figured out how retail staff can inspire confidence, and developed a gamified service training to nurture a new service culture.

Read the complete case study here.

Key learnings from project:

Less is more for learnability
Start testing early & informally
Live as a user (e.g. work in a store)

Co-creating an organisation’s collective identity and culture.

Role: Project lead, service designer, lead facilitator

A new statutory board was looking to develop its culture and define its values, to align all 1500 employees with the aspired way of working. Co-creation allowed members of the agency to create the culture, collectively with everyone.

To build momentum and create buy-in of the new values, we gamified all our engagements with staff, to make such workshop experiential while meeting the objective.

Read the complete case study here.

Key learnings from project:

Create excitement for excellence
Align on both what (activities) and how (approach)
Make it fun to create memories

What if opticians reassured you to see the world through a different lens?

Role: Project lead & service designer

Few things impact you more than the way you see the world. Additionally, first impressions are built on eye contact. So our eyes don’t just shape how we see things, but also how others
see us. How do you want to see? And how do you want to be seen? Surely the answer to both of those questions is “in the
best possible way”.

Read the complete case study here.

Key learnings from project:

Focus on the right problem (e.g. why people don't wear contacts, not why people wear now brand of contacts over another)
Search in new and unexpected places for solution inspiration

Designing a financial advisory service to provide seamless & custom experiences to different clients.

Role: Project lead & service designer

Through research with customers and home loan advisors, we identified 4 specific client profiles, each with different needs and behaviours in their home purchasing journey. To differentiate our client in a tough industry, we crafted a service strategy, scripts, and training content for advisors to effectively serve the needs of these different client profiles.

Key learnings from project:

Narrow down on moments to truth in customer journey early
Define relevance of personas to project objective
Flexibility for testing (e.g. on WhatsApp for quick feedback)

Raising the bar for service excellence, from 0% complaints to 100% compliments.

Role: Project lead & service designer

A well-known group operating several attractions, restaurants, and gift stores aspired to raise the bar for themselves to increase NPS and focus on creating consistently delightful service.

By co-creating and testing training with staff, we designed a 3-stage training with an engaging game, facilitated through simple game cards. The game prompts service staff to role-play as guests and hosts, and practice serving one-another using the newly crafted service principles.

To ensure consistent tracking, we also created a service assessment guide to measure training effectiveness, staff’s delivery of service, and customer experience improvements.

Key learnings from project:

Remove client-side managers from interviews for unbiased answers
Management buy-in is a must for implementation follow-through & staff commitment

Nurturing a culture of collaboration in a team with 30+ nationalities.

Role: Trainer & service designer

The various teams of a Singapore fintech firm “spoke different languages” - while they all spoke English, they had a hard time working together due to different priorities and approaches.

Through an extensive research process, we uncovered the root causes, and developed a solution comprising of tools for self-reflection to nudge behaviour change.

Key learnings from project:

Lack of momentum in co-creation indicates lack of commitment to implement
Good deliverables without adoption are bad deliverables
Make it bite-size

Training travel agencies on Design Thinking to transform their businesses.

Role: Trainer & toolkit design

This was a sector-wide engagement for the tourism industry in Singapore, focusing on mindset change and innovation capability development, through intensive multi-day design thinking workshops. I also contributed to multiple 1-on-1 coaching sessions with travel agents to develop their business ideas individually, and help them to overcome industry disruption. We quickly designed and tested app prototypes to validate new business ideas.

Additionally, we developed a design thinking toolkit for the travel industry, with key principles, tools, and activities to guide travel agents to start innovating independently.

Key learnings from project:

Value in industry-specific examples
Test with real customers quickly for buy-in
Be adaptable to changes on the fly

Business Innovation train-the-trainer program, on human-centered innovation.

Role: Trainer & innovation toolkit

We delivered a toolkit and train-the-trainer programme for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME) Centre Business Advisors (BAs), to equip them in running their own workshops, to enhance their consultation process with SMEs on business innovation, and to address various business challenges with a people-centered approach.

Key learnings from project:

Practice beats theory
Train-the-trainers with common mistakes and scripts for handling coaching scenarios

A selection of other projects during my role as studio lead & service designer at Ideactio:

New business model design to develop new business unit and positioning differentiation for regional security technology hardware distributor.
Role: Project Lead & Business Designer
Customer research & marketing strategy for regional
furniture brand.
Role: Design researcher
Womenswear brand post-covid growth & positioning strategy.
Role: Service Designer
Various speaking engagements.

Character reference

“A rare breed of talent in multiple design disciplines and an unmatched sense of ownership. Felix is extremely dependable, creative, and strategic - all in one package. As an empathic listener, he is able to uncover unarticulated needs by digging deeper and asking the right unscripted follow-up questions. Beyond deciphering meaningful insights, he has experience in and is skilled at defining strategic opportunities, by understanding the implications of research outcomes on business.”

- Nav Qirti, founder & principal of Ideactio

Innovation Culture

Co-creating an organisation’s collective identity and innovation culture

This project was completed during my employment at Ideactio. My role was as project lead. The copyrights to the project belong to Ideactio.

A new statutory board in Singapore was looking to develop its culture and define its values, to align all 1500 employees with the aspired ways of working. This agency was newly formed by merging teams from across Singapore government statutory boards.

Phase 00 - Pre Project

This project was awarded to Ideactio through a public tender. We won this project after I created a project proposal and pitch video within a short turnaround. The project was awarded based on our innovative and energetic pitching approach, as well as Ideactio's prior track record.

Phase 01 - Leadership Co-Creation

To understand the aspired culture of the organisation, and it's challenges in living the aspired culture, we conducted interviews several 1-1 interviews with the senior leadership. In these interviews, we had to quickly pivot our approach, after receiving the feedback from our interviewees that the conversations were not eliciting novel responses.

In later interviews we designed visual prompts such as "If your team were a superhero, who would they be and why?" to encourage creative thinking and make the interviews more engaging. The outcome of this phase was a consolidated perspective of the leadership on the aspired culture & values of the organisation.

Phase 02 - Microcosm Co-Creation

Having learnt from our engagements during phase 01 of this project, we designed an engaging co-creation session to generate new values with a microcosm of the organisation. This group of participants consisted of 200+ officers from various roles and functions, to achieve a feeling of participation and buy-in for the values being defined.

Values superheroes

Participants create a superhero that best embodies the spirit, super powers, and values of our aspired culture. The goal was to encourage bold & aspirational thinking.

Picture Pairs

Participants intuitively select a picture from a pair that best represents the aspired culture, and discuss why. The goal was to spur in-the-moment responses that are honest, and to not overthink.

Values Building Bricks

Particpants write down all their generated values on boxes, create emerging clusters across groups, and write labels. The goal was to converge all of the values across groups, and highlight the common high-priority ones.

Describing Culture

The top-voted values are assigned to different groups, to summarise their meaning & capture key phrases.

Phase 02 Outcome

The creative and fun experience design for these sessions were key to our success, as our engagement received positive feedback, with 96% of participants finding the sessions "better than expected" (score of 4&5 on a scale of 1-5).

The outcome was 6 new organisational values with a catchy mantra: "1 thing that drives us, 2 things that binds us, and 3 things that set us apart". Co-creation allowed members of the agency to create the culture, collectively.

As an extra challenge to myself, I committed to writing a draft of lyrics for a rap/ theme song for the organisation. Below is a snippet of these lyrics:

Innovation we exist for, think out of the box to do more,
Looking for better ways, solving problems to save the day.
Innovation is dreaming big - succeed faster by failing quick,
Solving crimes with forensics; in the study with the candlestick.

A complete draft of the theme song can be found here.

Phase 03 - Gamified values roll-out to the entire organisation

The final phase was more akin to game design than workshop design, with our ambition being to create the best workshop experience which officers had ever participated in.

After developing many ideas for creative exercises, we settled on the narative for the workshops as "Mission to Amarex, a journey to space". In our session, all participants were astronauts on a mission to find the elixir of immortality. Through several games, they experience all the values of the organisation.

Mission: Journey to Amarex

"Nobody would have believed, at the dawn of the 21st century, that civilisation would have achieved everything. This is it, the last leg. We have achieved so much. We have explored sublime planets - distant, colourful, different, worlds. Learning from them. Solving the greatest mysteries of space. It's unbelievable we are going to find the last missing puzzle piece, the elixir is so close, I can almost taste it."

Chapter 01: Stocking Up Resources

"The first leg of our journey will be to stock up on resources. We will be crossing an asteroid field, filled with space debris. Make sure you’re prepared to mine those asteroids as they’re key to the success of our mission."

Chapter 02: Encrypted Noises

"There is an incoming transmission, seems like our sister ship is trying to send a message! The ship was long lost, it seems like they have been trying to broadcast to us. It must be coming through now because we are getting closer to Amarex. What does this mean?!"

Chapter 03: Building in the Dark

"We are picking up readings from the surface. Looks like there’s a dismantled light tower on the ground. We will attempt to drop you as close a possible, perhaps it can be rebuilt. The light tower once stood on the dark side to guide people to the elixir. Find the pieces and rebuild the tower to reveal the path to immortality, in the midst of all this darkness. Be careful! There may be some space mines and craters!"

Intermission: The light starts to shine

"The pieces of the tower were weathered, as if they were faded by a solar storm. The tower had clearly been broken down long ago, and the tower pieces had endured the wrath of the elements. Some of the tower pieces were concealed under rubble, but the team managed to collect them all and assemble the pieces together. In the void of space, in the utter darkness, the light started to shine. It was a glow that had not been witnessed in centuries, a vivid blue glow that illuminated the path to the elixir of immortality."

Chapter 04: Heroes Monument

"Welcome back home! You are heroes in the public imagination, congratulations! Valere wants to celebrate the occasion, and commemorate the intergalactic achievement with a monument! The sculpture will feature a contribution from each of our heroes, you included! What is the message that you want to leave behind for future generations to remember?"

Project Reflections

As this was almost a 1-year long project, there were many learning along the way. These are my key personal takeaways:

Sessions are a lot more memorable when they are designed to be fun. Going the extra-mile with a creative facilitation approach received a great response from participants.
At the start of the project we made the mistake of only aligning with the client on our activities (what), but not on our approach (how). Early alignment of both sets clear expectations and ensures things go more smoothly.
Creating a fictional narrative (e.g. a mission to space) with the supporting props and environment helps to bring people out of their routines of thinking, to practice new behaviours. It's also great fun for facilitation to tell a story.

ClieNT TEstimonial

"Thank you very much for being so patient with us, and pushing the boundaries and delivering so excellently on the values project. Both the co-creation workshops and the space adventure would not have achieved the high standards without you as a driving force. I'm sure you will excel wherever you go."

- Director of Strategic Communication and client-side project overseer.

CooperVision

This article was written in celebration of this project receiving the Singapore SG Mark Design award 2021 by DBCS, category experience design.

This project was completed during my employment at Ideactio. My role was as project lead & service designer. The copyrights to the project belong to Ideactio. Ideactio's team is extremely honoured and grateful to have received this award, and thoroughly enjoyed the process of working collaboratively with Coopervision.

Designing the service for a product customers are scared of: A service design project for a contact lens brand.

This is Shaun. Shaun wears glasses. Not because he wants to, but because he needs them to be able to see in his day-to-day life.

One day, Shaun goes to an optical store to buy a new pair of spectacles. In the store, the Eye Care Practitioner (ECP) asks him if he would like to be able to see without glasses. “Of course I do”, he says. “It would be so much more convenient, and I will feel a lot better. But how?”

The ECP recommends him to consider contact lenses. Hesitant at first, Shaun is guided to overcome his concerns, and decides to give it a try. That day, he walks out the store feeling confident with his looks for the first time since he started wearing spectacles 15 years ago.

Experience design to reassure spectacle wearers to see the world through a different lens. (Awarded SG Mark Design Award 2021)

Eye Care Practitioners (ECPs) play a pivotal role in creating the customer service experience in optical stores in order to ensure customer satisfaction. CooperVision, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of soft contact lenses, distributes their products through optical retailers. Consequently, they rely on the Eye Care Practitioners of optical retailers to interact with their wearers, who might come in seeking just one vision solution, but are unaware of other vision solutions that could cater to their other lifestyle needs.

The primary goal of this experience design is to help wearers look and feel good by recommending them multiple vision solutions that fit their lifestyle needs. In order to effectively deliver the desired service experience, CooperVision wanted to train ECPs in a customer-centric service approach. Ideactio created the EYECARE service approach and training for frontline optical staff to equip them with service and sales techniques to positively impact the lives of their wearers through the service they provide.

The EYECARE ambassador tool and service approach is designed to help optical retail front-liners impact the lives of wearers by helping them to look good and feel good.

About the project

Staff in optical stores face various difficulties selling contact lenses, yet research revealed that it is not due to a simple sales capability challenge. After all, optical staff are well equipped to sell spectacles too.

Our objective was to develop a compelling service training for optical staff, to teach them how to sell contact lenses. This required reframing the problem, and repositioning the solution: contact lenses are more than a product that helps spectacle wearers to see. A successful contact lens experience resolves fear, provides reassurance, and allows wearers to meet their lifestyle needs in a new way. Ultimately, the goal is to allow wearers to look good and feel good through the vision solutions that they choose and the service they receive.

The Solution

7 E.Y.E.C.A.R.E. Service Principles

The E.Y.E.C.A.R.E Service Principles were synthesised from interviews with ECPs staff and an internal workshop with CooperVision to understand the ideal service that ECPs could deliver to customers. The principles are also an easy way for ECPs to remember how to deliver great service, as the acronym comes together to form the word EYECARE.

21 Service Techniques

To guide ECPs in adopting the 7 Service Principles, each principle comes with 3 curated service techniques. Each with its own short activity to help ECPs practice their service skills. Techniques include methods to handle common objections, provide empathetic reassurance, and encourage customers to consider trying something they have not tried before.

Tips, Scripts, & Practice Activities

Each service technique follows a structure that includes the objective of the techniques, tips to apply them, examples of things to say, and activities to practice the techniques.

Ending each service technique with an ‘Activity’ encourages ECPs to practice the service technique in their optical store and apply them to their own lives. These service techniques are also life skills that can positively impact the ECPs’ own personal growth.

Lifestyle Consumer Archetypes

7 Customer Archetypes represent 7 key reasons why customers might not consider using contact lenses yet, and tips on how to help them overcome these objections.

Service Journey Scripts

In the 8-step service journey, each step is detailed with the service goal and actions to achieve the goal.

An example conversation is then used to illustrate the service journey, helping ECPs to understand how to achieve the service goal at each stage, while applying the recommended service techniques.

Roleplay

To help put learning into practice, the Roleplay section helps ECPs apply the service techniques that they have acquired together with the different customer archetypes in the service journey.

Tracking Progress

Measurable outcomes are key for users to see the value of a tool. At the end of the tool, we developed a simple progress tracker for ECPs to reflect on their own progress - in terms of how much they are practicing the E.Y.E.C.A.R.E Service Principles in their day-to-day work. After their self-evaluation, ECPs might wish to improve at one or more of them, so they can then go back to the respective service techniques for each principle.

Impact

Although exact figures on the impact of the tool reside with the client, there is evidence of its impact:

After a successful pilot in Singapore, the tool was rolled out into 7 additional countries: China, Taiwan, Korea, HK, Malaysia, Australia, & New Zealand.
The learnings from the tool were captured in an eLearning course, as a subsequent project from the client, for ECPs to learn about identifying customer types efficiently.
The project was awarded Singapore SG Mark Design Award 2021, Experience Design Category

Client Testimonial

"Appreciate all the dedication and hard work you've put into our projects. It has been my pleasure working with you. I have said this before and it still stands that I trust in the work that you deliver because of the extra mile you go to make things work."

- Kenny, Regional Marketing Intelligence Manager & client-side project lead

Benjamin Barker

Design thinking helped menswear label Benjamin Barker deliver excellent customer service, contributing to record sales in 2019.

This case study has been written and published by Design Singapore Council. All credit for the story goes to them.

This project was completed during my employment at Ideactio. My role was as project lead & service designer. The copyrights to the project belong to Ideactio.

Homegrown menswear label Benjamin Barker turned to design thinking initially to create a tailored onboarding and training programme for its Fashion Advisors. But what resulted from the co-designing process was service culture change for the SME, contributing to record sales and growth.

Everybody buys clothes. For most men, this is a transactional experience: you leave the store after successfully buying the 2 shirts you came for. But what if you could leave a store feeling more confident than when you came in?

from transactions to experiences

Benjamin Barker is a purveyor of smart-casual, heritage-inspired apparel for men. Founded in 2009 by Nelson Yap, it currently has 10 outlets in Singapore, with franchises in Malaysia, Cambodia and Australia. Among its almost 90-strong local staff are about 35 customer-facing Fashion Advisors.

Before 2019, there was no formal training for newly-hired Fashion Advisors. They picked up skills and knowledge on-the-job from Store Managers. Thus, there was no consistency across stores.

The company’s existing “training manual” consisted of a set of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), which was outdated and inconsistent from multiple ad hoc updates. Because it was presented in plain text and was wordy, most of the staff did not refer to it.

The lack of standardised training affected the Fashion Advisors’ confidence when interacting with customers as they were never sure if they were dispensing the “right” advice and were constantly second-guessing themselves.

For these reasons, Yap (Founder & Creative Director) engaged Ideactio in February 2019. The initial brief to the design consultancy firm was to develop a coherent onboarding and training programme for new Fashion Advisors.

co-creating a new solution

Ideactio employed a Design Thinking approach, characterised by people-centricity and co-design.

Felix Mollinga (Project Lead / Service Designer & Researcher) spent three months interviewing key staff, which included – among others – the chief designer, visual merchandiser and product trainer, store managers and supervisors.

To understand the ground situation, the Ideactio team carried out ethnographic observations. A mystery shopper was also sent into stores to observe and experience their customer service.

A key part of this project was the creation of artefacts, in the form of game cards and training manuals. The content development for these educational resources also led to an in-depth study of the organisation’s vision, mission, structure and branding.

The information gathered was shared with Benjamin Barker, and what ensued was a co-designing process of ideation, iteration and execution; with ideas being prototyped and fine-tuned.

Nav Qirti, Principal at Ideactio, points out, “An important outcome of the co-designing journey was that the initial brief evolved from a staff training project into a service culture project.”

Damien Tan, Benjamin Barker’s Chief Operating Officer, believes that a great customer service experience is a reflection of an organisation and its culture. To achieve a service culture that’s driven by empathy, purpose and brand, staff behaviour had to be shaped by service principles and values.

“Once we started digging deeper into what this brand was about and why the staff felt it was special, we got a wealth of insights which were critical for us in designing the training programme,” says Mollinga.

Key insights gathered that influenced the training programme

Front-liner profile: The Fashion Advisors were largely non-native speakers (from Malaysia, Vietnam and China). As such, they preferred the information to be bite-sized, visual, and easy to understand.

Benjamin Barker’s unique branding: Benjamin Barker’s ads showed men in suits wearing sneakers or on skateboards – “a modern classic gentleman” who didn’t fit the typical bill. As such, Fashion Advisors had to know the seemingly paradoxical brand identity well.

Lack of styling knowledge: Benjamin Barker sold complete outfit for men: shirts, pants, blazers, ties, belts, shoes, pocket squares and lapel pins. But most customers left the store with just what they walked in to buy, because the staff were only able to facilitate a sale but not to upsell. The key issue was that they lacked knowledge of styling (putting together an outfit) necessary for upselling.

Engaging content needed: Knowing how to put together an outfit involved learning about colour theory, what to wear for different occasions, understanding the value of using accessories, and more. To make learning fun and interactive, the training material would have to include game cards, QR codes with links to demonstration videos, and role-play to practise skills.

14 types of customers: From ethnographic observations, 12 customer profile cards were created, detailing what each looked out for, required and preferred. Two additional profiles – Angry and Verbally Abusive – were added to enable staff to practise handling various customer types and scenarios.

Beyond selling: Good customer experience goes beyond being served by a confident and knowledgeable Fashion Advisor. For the staff, it also involved engaging customers in a conversational way or being patient in trying circumstances. As such, soft skills had to be taught.

Time constraints: Setting aside time for training was a challenge because the priority for retail staff was their daily sales and operations. As such, the training had to be designed to be self-administered and integrated into the work-day.

A service culture capability-building programme

During content development, Ideactio realised the overwhelming amount of information the staff had to know in order to sell menswear: Fabric care, leather goods, consignment items, store visual merchandising, and more. These, they organised into a basic training structure.

The outcome was a service culture capability-building programme that spanned two months, with exercises to be practised on a daily basis. The training kit came with two training manuals and a pack of game cards covering areas such as Service Principles, Customer and Situation.

For each day of the week, a specific category was focused on: Mystery Mondays (random topic), Products on Tuesdays, Styling on Wednesdays, Operations on Thursday, and Customer Service on Fridays. The content gets increasingly more advanced as the weeks go by.

Each day, the trainee would follow a process: The first 15 minutes of the day would be spent with the Store Manager going through the day’s objective and morning activity. Throughout the day, there would be an activity to focus the learning; and the day would end with key takeaways and a worksheet.

Outcome

The project ran from February to September 2019. In Benjamin Barker’s 10-year history, 2019 was their most profitable year. Tan estimates that the company made close to S$15 million, which is a 15 to 20 percent increase from 2018. While many factors contributed to that, Tan believes “this project was one of the key factors that led to the record growth of the company.”

The project has also enhanced customer service. “It’s hard to quantify a good customer experience, but we are receiving more unsolicited compliments from our real-time customer feedback system in stores and on social media. We believe that’s a clear indication we’re moving in the right direction.”

Overall, the Fashion Advisors are happier and more confident because they know what they need to do, Tan adds. “If they’re unsure about anything, they can refer to the training materials.”

The training materials also came in useful during the COVID-19 retail slow-down, when Workforce Singapore encouraged companies to use that period to upskill staff. “One area we found our people lacking in was visual merchandising and product knowledge, so we developed an internal course and used this deck of cards as part of the training material,” says Tan of how they adapted the project.

In the pipelines too is taking the training programme online. “We have invested in a HR software which has a training component where we can upload these training modules,” adds Tan. “Our staff can do these exercises online, and it will be easier for us to follow-up.”

Benjamin Barker has plans to extend this training programme to their franchised stores overseas, with the aim of achieving a consistent service culture across borders.

On hindsight, Tan feels the process was time-consuming but fruitful. “In the long term, systemising the operational and customer journey processes through DT really gives everyone greater clarity.”

He believes such a project is helpful and timely for retailers. “With the proliferation of online shopping, what differentiates a physical store from an online store is the customer experience. So if we’re able to provide the best experience to our customers, I believe we have a winning formula.”

Implicated Objects

"Moving beyond the binary narratives of victims and perpetrators, this series of 3D printed objects is both an homage and appropriation of colonial artifacts, created through digital piracy."

Implicated Objects reworks Michael Rothberg's concept of The Implicated Subject, providing a different way of thinking about historical violence, to move beyond familiar categories of victims and perpetrators. The implicated subject is "part of a post-memory generation, and is prosthetically connected to historically significant or problematic pasts it did not directly experience."

The problematic pasts of colonial objects frustrate aesthetic appreciation, despite their unique appearance and the exquisite craftsmenship that went into making these objects. They are situated in between the binary narratives of being "from the deck" and "from the shore".

This series takes its coral-like aesthetic from these objects, often found by scuba divers at the bottom of the ocean, in the shipwrecks of trading vessels that were never able to complete their journeys. Their cargo is unintentionally positioned between vantage points - between deck and shore. Over time, they have grown together by sea creatures looking to build a home.

This is recreated using digital replication and 3D printing. Objects that otherwise remain frozen in time become open to reproduction, manipulation, and reappropriation. Opposing colonial efforts of monopolising trade. Each derivative disperses implication into more extensive networks of association. Does replicating and manipulating them also replicate their implication?

Over 1700 ships of the VOC attempted more than 8000 journeys between Europe and Asia. Around 250 of those ships sunk somewhere on their journeys. Of only about 30 of those the location on the seabed is known.

"...this had an impact on the types of hybrid artworks the Dutch commissioned. They expanded and increasingly commercialised the trade shifting the focus from costly and exclusive items to larger quantities of appealing and affordable objects for a wider market."

Nowadays, these objects are displayed in museums, or sold at auctions and added to private collections. The ones in museum collections are kept safely behind glass, not being used anymore for their once intended purpose. They are shipped across the world to be displayed at various exhibitions for many people to admire. They are typically made of silver, gold, ivory, glass, porcelain and other precious materials, richly decorated by exquisite craftsmen with unparralleled skill.

"...these goods were often equally a reflection of artistic interactions made possible through the global networks of the VOC. The potters of Jingdezhen and Arita, the silversmiths of Batavia, and the textile dyers of the Coromandel Coast adeply altered the designs and shapes of their wares to cater to many different European and Asian markets to satisfy Dutch conceptions of Asia."

What interests me in these objects is their existence as hybrids - European design tastes were mixed with Chinese, Japanese, Buddhist, Hindu, and other Asian influences by the craftsmen by which they were created, predating the modern industrial supply chain by some 300 years.

"Perhaps the best examples of the contact point between the perspectives 'from the deck and 'from the shore are the types of goods traded between them."

Visiting the exhibition "An old new world" of the National Museum Singapore, the permanent collection of Asian Civilisations Museum Singapore, or the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, I can not but admire the artefacts with colonial histories on display. If you have visited these exhibitions, you may too have overheard diverse visitors admiring the same objects.

Quote from and books pictured:

"Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age", accompanying the exhibition of the same name, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, and Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2016.

"An old new world, from the East Indies to the Founding of Singapore, 1600s-1819", National Museum of Singapore, catalogue of the exhibition with the same name, 2019

Databall_

Databall_ is a pinball machine that visualises the flow of personal data, making kids aware of their online tracks in a playful way.

Children grow up in a digital world without understanding the true value of personal information. Through their smart phones and tablets they leave traces all over the internet without realising it. This fun game shows the score and boosts awareness.

Sixty balls represent the data, which cover all aspects of daily digital life – from chat history to photo’s and online purchases. They bounce past interested parties: data traders, the government, supervising authorities and criminals. Hitting the data trader pop-bumpers wins you points, but beware of getting hacked: then it’s game over.

“Do we continue to play this game, knowing that we forfeit our data?”

"We communicate, and sometimes it goes wrong."

That is the essence of what childeren need to learn about data. But what data is collected about you? Who is involved? And how does data get traded?

How would data look if it would be an outdoor urban playground? Or as a boardgame, a marble run, or a pinball machine? This exploration shows translations of the data system into different types of games that incorporate an element of flow.

I did further research into how childeren are taught about online behavior, social media, and personal data, including the teaching tricks like the feedback loops of popular games, and game elements of pinball machines.

Databall was first prototyped in various shapes of cardboard scale-models. After this in a full size cardboard model, which was used to prototype the initial projections, and the pinball electronics. This model I copied into a 3D drawing to help choose material finishes, colors and details with different renderings. The final digital drawing was then used to prepare drawings for lasercutting of the sheetmetal parts that made the final machine. Several pinball pop-bumper electronics were reverse engineered to fit and work. After lots of metal bending, welding, electrical soldering, designing the projection and sound effects, Databall_ came to life.

Blur

Have you ever stood waiting in line, felt bored on a toilet, or been kept on hold for too long? During moments of lost time we reach for our phones — immediately occupying ourselves with meaningless socials. Yet herein lies an amazing opportunity to create, play and enjoy.

BLUR restores your daily dose of daydream: attaching to the back of your smartphone, transforming it into a mesmerizing spinning interface.

Design and video production by Felix Mollinga, music by Remy Borsboom

Additive Crystal

Additive crystal is a collection of lamps that combines two additive manufacturing techniques. Man-made, 3D-printed frames continue to grow after the printing is done, developing their own crystal skin.

The process of 3D-printing and the forming of mineral crystals seem worlds apart, but are actually based on the same principle, slowly materializing layer by layer. Fascinated by their similarities and differences, I managed to manipulate them into a co-creative unity. Both materials need a day to complete their part of the structure. The printing is controlled, precise, and industrial. The crystals are unpredictable, stubborn, and organic. One strengthens fragility and the other contributes sparkle and translucency.

“The frames are identical, their skin is unique”

Uniting similarity & contrast

This series of lamps combines two additive manufacturing techniques: 3d printing and mineral crystals. Both processes take several days, slowly adding material layer by layer, growing their own complexity. The printing is controlled, precise, and industrial. The crystals are unpredictable, stubborn, and organic. This contrast highlights their co-dependence: one strengthens fragility and the other contributes sparkle and translucency.

Making 3d Printing grow

The project I want to realize is to combine modern 3d printing techniques with the oldest ancient form of 3d printing: mineral crystals.

Mineral crystals are in a way a form of additive manufacturing that has existed since before there were even living organisms, forming solids layer by layer in the earth crust under completely natural circumstances. In contrast, industrial printing uses high tech machines in a controlled environment to create completely manmade shapes. Both processes build up material in layers. Both are not fast techniques, slowly growing to completion. These are two techniques that have a completely different form language, one organically unpredictable and one very precisely man-made. They have different strengths and weaknesses and both have their own design restrictions. But down to the essence, they are based on the same process.

The past months I have been experimenting with growing crystals, understanding this process, trying different chemical solutions and exploring the possiblities of the aforementioned combination. When combining these materials, I aim to make them co-dependant. The crystals cannot grow in thin air, they are fragile, look precious, and will cling to any support they can grab onto. 3D printing allows for any shape, virtually unlimited intricacy, and a way to 'design the crystals'. They are a perfect fit.

I've found that making crystals follow the desired shape isn't easy but creates a magnificent effect. In nature crystals are stubborn. You'll not find them growing in straight lines, in perfect circles or in regular patterns. While in the past weeks I've accomplished just that, setting them to my own hand.

FIRST experiments

These photos show the first 3D printed structures combined with growing materials. These experiments were the start of the research around the question "What if our 3D prints could grow?"

Can 3D prints break the size barrier by growing?
Can printed structures be filled in by organic materials?
How do printed and growing materials interact when combined?

3D printers have become more and more refined; ironically making products smaller and more detailed, instead of bigger. I wanted to use this refinement and break with it at the same time. Precision is great, but with it come long print times. If i could make the print a skeleton for the growing material, I would save time, material and money. While the growing material also adds uniqueness.

Obsurv

Unidentified male

Needs OBSURV to keep his face out of public online datasets, after involvement in a scandalous leak and living in fear of being located. He leads a secluded life in a small social circle, but his dog will not follow him on walks if he cannot see his eyes.

Unidentified female

Wears OBSURV because she dislikes the idea of strangers googling a picture if her face and finding her online presence based on a facial match. She believes in honest first impressions and likes the possibility of looking into a person's eyes when having a conversation.

Unidentified male

Uses OBSURV daily because his facial features falsely trigger AI-driven security algorithms. He enjoys living an ordinary life without being detained for questioning three times a month simply because he is unlucky to have a stereotypically criminal face.

Grid

GRID Tablestands designed and produced during an internship at NathanYongDesign in Singapore.

Acoin

Think of Acoin as a USB flash drive for money. It stores cash electronically and displays the amount stored. Acoin anonymizes electronical payments, by existing as an offline node in our online interconnected world.

Our spending habits create an outline of who we are. You might think targeted advertising is all there is to this story, but your data gets traded with whoever is willing to pay. Acoin is designed for a future where governments have gotten rid of cash. Not if, but when this happens: how much freedom will we have left?

This project came about after living in Singapore, and feeling observed all the time. Even when there is nothing illegal about your actions, the awareness of being watched leads to a forced obedience and conformity. This suppresses behavior: creativity and critical thinking are muted and democracy is thrown out the window.

Acoin works together with your phone. From your e-banking app, you can transfer money to the device. This money is now offline. When making a payment, there are three possibilities:
1. By holding Acoins together you can send the value on your Acoin, or a pre-set amount, to another Acoin. Confirmation of sending money occurs through the fingerprint reader.
2. You can erase your fingerprint, and swap Acoins. In this scenario, one Acoin contains money, and the other does not. The only transaction is the data stored on the device, as the exchange of hardware is mutual, and therefore zero.
3. When making large payments, you can give Acoin away, together with the data it contains.

Because of this unpredictability, no one can tell where your money came from, and through whose hands it passed. The money on Acoin becomes untraceable, and paying with it anonymous. For storing money, Acoin relies on cryptocurrency keys.

For storing money, Acoin relies on cryptocurrency keys. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are a decentralized form of currency, free from all government controlled banking systems. The integrity of the system is maintained by the community of users. Every connected phone or computer becomes a node in a network that verifies the validity of transactions. This ensures the safety and stability of the currency.

Cryptocurrencies are relatively new forms of currency. Acoin relies on them for their anonymity and ability to store money electronically on storage that is physically on the device instead of in a cloud. So when you lose your Acoin, your money is gone. Just like cash. This also means that as the money is offline it can be passed around freely.

Ascension

Ascension is inspired by the culinary philosophy of Brazilian chef Alex Atala. He believes that food is a cycle: from the land to the plate. "Behind every dish there is death", as food needs to be harvested or killed in order to be eaten. Yet this is not to mourn, as the dish can be seen as a celebration of a life lived, completing the transformation of the cycle and starting it over again. This set of tableware consists of three items: two cloches and a plate, that all stack over each other. The diner lifts one after the other, which is a poetic translation of passing through the stages of the cycle.

Seven Headed Naga

The seven headed naga: the serpent that forms a bridge between life and afterlife. Set with seven black onys stones.

This piece was inspired by a trip to Cambodia, where I saw the temples of Angkor Wat. All of them richly decorated with seven headed nagas, garudas and more mythical creatures.

For enquiries about personalised jewellery, please drop me and email at felix_mollinga@hotmail.com

Write Minimal

Sequence Rings

A set of three personalised rings. Each incorporates references to a family member, a location, and a period of life. For enquiries about personalised jewellery, please drop me and email at felix_mollinga@hotmail.com