Image from tiongbahru.market

Hawker centre is culture, is history,  is charming, is Singaporean, and it is real. “Cool,” however, has never been in the vocabulary until local design studio Bravo creates an animated directory for the Tiong Bahru Market. The online directory shows an illustrated aerial view of the hawker centre—including tables and chairs, patrons, and cigarette smoke wafting in the smoker’s corner. When you roll your mouse over the numbered stalls, their names, opening hours, and illustrations of their foods pop out. The meticulous designers captured the nuances of the colours—the yellow of the fish ball noodles is more fluorescent than the egg tarts’—and whet my appetite with their beautiful renditions of peng kueh and ming jian kueh. They even included the tiffany-blue and marigold plates—the defining characteristics of the hawker food presentation. If you have food selection disorder, like I do when faced with more 80 stalls, the website’s “generator,” essentially a jackpot machine, will help you decide what to have for mains, drinks, and dessert.

Image from tiongbahru.market

Image from tiongbahru.market

Bravo’s directory gives the hawker centre a fresh paint without physically changing the much treasured institution. This allows the designers to make the hawker centre more appealing to the youths who are more likely to be drawn to the neighbourhood’s hip and cool cafes, without offending the others who appreciate the hawker centre as it is. Here’s my email interview with Bravo where they shared with me their intentions, their processes, and the hawkers’ responses.

Your guide is for youths who are “blind” to such old institutions. In what ways does your guide appeal to the youths?

In the Tiong Bahru neighbourhood that is burgeoning with popularity because of the cafes popping up, we feel that there is a need to make more young people (within our age demographic) consider the market more. Perhaps, what we mean by blind is that the youths are blind to the market’s configurations and to let the guide be a way finding tool for them. We would think the guide speak more to youths because there is a level of engagement on the website due to its interactive and personalised features. We hope it spurs a desire on their end to go to the market and experience it the same way we at Bravo did.

What are some of the challenges during the execution?

Time was one of the biggest challenges. As this project is self-initiated, we had to squeeze in time in between our client work to complete it. We took about a year and a half to complete the project from conceptualisation to launch. The guide is illustration heavy, so one of the other challenges we faced was having to split up the illustration work between a few designers while making sure everything looks like it was done by one person. To overcome this, one designer set the art direction, which served as a framework for the rest. On the website development aspect, which was also done in-house, it was mostly to keep the site as fast and light weight as possible with all the images and animations we had. Standardisation across all platforms and devices was also tricky, which involved a lot of testing within the team.

Have the hawkers seen the directory? What do they think about it?

We’ve spoken to a couple of them who we regularly patronise and they’ve given positive comments so far. Some of them have known about project from long before when we were collating their store information, so they were pretty excited to see it finally up. Not sure if it has helped their businesses in any way though.

Bravo has done branding for several restaurants. Do you think the hawker centres need rebranding? If so, in what ways?

We don’t think so. The charm of hawker centres lie in its honesty – it doesn’t need to put up any facades, what you see is what you get. Also, the purpose of a rebranding often times is to rejuvenate a brand which in the case we feel, hawker centres do not need – they’ll always be relevant in Singapore’s changing society due to its affordability and accessibility. Is the guide meant to modernise the market? Nope, at the end of the day, it is a gesture we, at Bravo, wanted to do for the market, having it been a second home to the Bravo family, it’s a well-loved place.

Have you considered creating directories for other hawker centres, such as the Chinatown Complex, which I, and I believe many others, need help with to navigate the 200+ stalls? What will be your considerations?

The Tiong Bahru Market Food Directory is merely a personal side project that the team believed in and was based on our connection to the place and the vendors we see on a daily basis. At the moment, it isn’t a consideration for us as we would want to keep the exclusivity of what we’ve done just for Tiong Bahru Market alone.

I thought it would be great if those little people in your directory correspond with the actual number of people in the hawker centre, by hooking up with Facebook’s check-in feature for example. Is it possible?

I think that would be too intensive! I guess we didn’t see a need for it as well.