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.

Neil Tavern, 1945, courtesy of Cool Culinaria

If you read them correctly, restaurant menus tell you more than just what’s on offer from the kitchen. Look closely and you’ll spot unwitting details of the era in which they were made. And if you have access to a choice collection of them that spans decades, they’ll actually tell you the story of America’s history (and make you pretty hungry, too). Oftentimes, you don’t even need to look beyond the artful covers to form an idea of the bygone days…

Read the rest of my story for the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) here.

“Singaporeans” are more befittingly the colours of what they eat, rather than the colours of their skins. This is because food colours express what skin colours do not: shared history, intercultural exchanges, common understanding of tastes, and love for the same food. In this poster, which expresses the intimacy between people in Singapore using the colours of their foods, the introduction reads:

“People have been contemplating similarities and differences with one another based on the colours of their skins. What it means to be black, white, or yellow is derived not from the essence of these colours, but from the shifting relations between the people born with these colours. Even though the consequences of being one race and not another changes with time and space, skin colours stay the same and fail to reflect these realities. The colours of one’s food, however, are testimonies to these changing conditions. They bloom and fade with the rise and fall of the native eaters, and they transform as the foods plunge into a melting pot of other world’s cuisines. What we are looking at are the colours that connect the Chinese, Malay, Indians, and other races in Singapore. Their foods are predominantly red and brown in hues because of the mixing of immigrant and native cultures and ingredients—an intercourse brought about by necessity, but has since developed into a common love for soy sauce, rempah, and sambal. “Singaporeans” are more befittingly the colours of what they eat, rather than the colours of their skins.”

Idea & Process

This idea to colour code hawker dishes found in Singapore came about because I was curious if it was possible to make conclusive statements about Singapore hawker food based on their colours. Following the advise of a designer friend, Shanyang, who runs a visualisation design studio, I trawled through Instagram for pictures of hawker food. These pictures could be taken in Singapore, Malaysia, or Indonesia, and there was no way to determine unless the person who took the picture indicated so. Knowing that there are slight variations (in terms of ingredients and even garnishing) in some dishes in these three countries, I picked the ones that were most representative of the styles commonly seen in Singapore. For example, I chose a picture of a bowl of wanton mee that was visibly yellow, rather the ones doused in black sauce, a version popular in Kuala Lumpur. While I do have a personal preference for charred char siew and poached chicken rice, and I did choose pictures that piqued my appetite, it was not my intention to assert that the colours collected from these pictures were the most “accurate” or “representative” of hawker food in Singapore, if accuracy and a representation were even possible.

After gathering pictures of more than 50 hawker dishes, Shanyang wrote a programme to identify the colours and generated a colour chart (below) of each dish. The colour ratio was based on the proportions of the ingredients. However, because of the different lighting conditions under which these pictures were taken, this programme sometimes identified two or more shades on the same ingredient. For consistency, we manually removed the colours that did not look like what we saw in the pictures, so that one ingredient only had one colour in the chart. But of course, the ingredients could be so well mixed, like in epok epok, that there was only one colour for all the ingredients.

Rationalising the Colours

What I ended up having were 54 colour charts. I attempted to make sense by categorising them according to race and food types (eg. seafood VS meat or noodle VS rice), but in none of which a pattern emerged. Besides, to label satay “Malay” even though many satay uncles are Indian Muslims, and despite that the Chinese has their own version, simply did not sit well with me. So instead of seeking differences, I looked out for similarities. When I gave up classifying these foods, it became clear to me that their affinities were more revealing than their disparities. These foods are predominantly red and brown in hues, and it is because Singaporeans share a love for sambal, chilli, soy sauce as well as its derivatives like kecap manis.

Design Concept

This poster was the creativity and effort of Sher Chew, a Singaporean graphic designer whom I was fortunate to be acquainted with in New York. Because the colours were not supposed to state a fact but to inspire a perspective, Sher did not present them as an infographic. Instead, she came up with a design good to think with and also to be admired for its aesthetics. In the previous versions, the colours were presented in pie charts. But Sher thought the circles looked isolated, and they didn’t convey a sense of connection between the dishes — a message that we had wished to bring across. Hexagon, on the other hand, suggested possibility of unification. Yet, Sher left gaps between them, to remind that there is room for greater intimacy.

Poster version 1.

What it would have looked like without engaging professional designers. A foolish attempt to manually colour code all my meals during the early stage.

NYC’s deliverymen brave the heat, the rain, the potholes, the mad men behind the wheels, and, at this time of the year, the snow. Unless it is a blizzard like today, when the mayor bans all non-emergency vehicles including food delivery bicycles, these men have to put up with slick roads and wind chill. Many refurbish their bicycles to make their job as tolerable as possible, like fitting two furry pockets on the handlebars to keep the hands warm during the ride. The plastic bags, I believe, keep the pockets from getting wet by the rain or snow. Simple brilliance like this reminds me of how little some people have but also how having little inspires ingenuity.

(image from School of Visual Art’s Container List)

The items found in New York City’s Chinese groceries today, I can imagine, are baffling to Chinese and non-Chinese alike. What is one to do with a whole packet of duck tongues, black fungus, and dried bean curd sticks? (Answer: braise it, stir-fry it, and stew it, respectively) The very same items in the 1970s, a time when Chinese and all things about them were very much considered exotic, would have been deemed mysterious, or even dangerous, and required a caption to go along for the uninitiated. Perhaps seeing a need there, Milton Glaser, the man behind the overly adapted I love New York logo, created a chart-like poster to guide one through a Chinatown grocery. It explained items like preserved celery cabbage, thousand-year eggs, and even provided instructions for calculating with an abacus.

Commissioned by the International Design Conference, the poster was created in 1972—the same year Nixon went to China after decades of hostility and distrust between the two nations. Then Chinese Prime Minister Zhou En Lai hosted a meal in Nixon’s honour and the live broadcast sparked off an explosion of interest in Chinese food. Prior to that, during the Cold War, communist and Chinese were synonymous to the Americans and so was their hatred towards them. Therefore, only in 1972 and the subsequent years would Glaser’s poster be of use to the mainstream Americans.

Winner of the Design-A-Tee contest (picture from Channel News Asia)

An illustration of 71 dishes and drinks depicting Singapore’s iconic food culture wins MediaCorp’s “Design-A-Tee” contest. The comments following the Facebook announcement—as with many users comments on various online platforms—are brutal but insightful. While some Singaporeans give the thumbs up for the design, there are complaints that generally fall into three categories:

1. Spelling and translation

Bo bo cha cha or burbur cha cha? Oneh oneh or ondeh ondeh? Cwhee kueh or chwee kueh? Several people have disputed the spellings of the dishes on the designs. Since many of these names are translated from other languages and dialects, it’s hard to tell who’s right and who’s wrong. Just look at the range of spellings for bee hoon/bihun/mee hoon on signboards at hawker centres and coffee shops. These differences are due to historical and cultural reasons and their names do transform over time. Tomato was native to South America and the Aztecs called it xitomatl. But it became known as “love apples” in France because the French called it pomme d’maure, which means “apple of the Moors,” and many thought it was pomme d’amour. Although standardising the spellings of all foods and drinks will make researching and documenting easier, it will also dilute their eventful pasts. Besides, how should one choose which kueh, kuih or kway to use?

2. Race representation

Because Singapore is a multiracial country, and the state consciously brands itself as so, its citizens tend to seek out such a representation in any works that illustrate the nation. For some, the winning design features dishes predominantly of the ethnic Chinese. It leaves out some like lontong, yet includes the potato wheel, a tidbit with unclear origins.

But what is the magic ratio for this design to be considered fair to all races? Is it 1:1:1 or should it parallel the population size? What then will represent the state-constituted “Other” of Singapore’s racial composition? While the Peranakans are represented by dishes like cendol (or is it chendol?) in the design, no one seems to be up in arms that the Eurasians dishes are missing. Wait a minute, is cendol Malay or Indonesian or…

The challenge in tracing the origins of a dish further complicates the debate. Is a dish like satay supposed to be categorised according to the ethnicity of its inventors (if one traces too far back in time, the Turks of the Ottoman Empire will have to be taken in as one of the nation’s ethnicities), or of the people today who usually peng kang the skewers (the Malays, Indian Muslims, and the Hainanese all do)? Perhaps, it should be categorised according to the races of those who enjoy satay (but who doesn’t?).

Given Singapore’s mix of ethnicities, religions, and social classes, there will always be people left out from any portrayal of the nation. Social categories to which individuals belong determine, in this case, food choices and the meanings associated with them. Therefore, the hawker foods with which the Muslims imagine Singapore are different from the non-Muslims’ top 10 favourites. A middle class shipyard worker who lives in Jurong will base his memories of the nation upon a set of hawker foods different from an upper class banker who lives in Katong. To assume every Singaporean’s idea of the national cuisine is the same is to say that everyone is born equal. But we’re not.

To acknowledge that differences will inevitably emerge is not so that one can disregard the presence of others. It is to recognise how pointless it is to pursue an arbitrary and merely symbolic “racial balance”. To think that it is possible or meaningful to categorise individual dishes according to race reflects a failure to recognise that many hawker dishes already testify to the intermingling of the nation’s diverse cultures. Mee soto and mee rebus are possible because Chinese noodles met Malay spices. Fish head curry came about because some Indian cooks tried to cater to their fish head-loving Chinese customers. Singapore is not the only immigrant country in the world (think USA), but it is one of the few that boasts a fairly well-integrated cuisine, and the members of most races devour one another’s share of contributions. Since most Singaporeans enjoy roti prata and chicken rice, why segregate one dish as Indian and the other as Chinese?

3. Local/Non-Local

Someone also points out that the siew mai included in the design is not Singaporean. Our pioneer Cantonese immigrants brought this mainstay of dim sum to Singapore, and while siew mai is not created in Singapore, it has become a common dish in many Singaporeans’ diet. This is also the case for nasi padang, roti prata, milo dinosaur, chicken rice, chai peng, mee goreng, durian, kueh lapis, ice kachang, and biryani. Instead of nitpicking the legitimacy of these “Singaporean dishes,” it is more constructive to judge the entire cuisine. The winning design is not Malaysian because it would have included nasi kandar and roti prata would have been called roti canai. Neither is it Indonesian, because there is not a dash of Balinese or Sudanese element in it. It is not this or that dish the designer selects, but the combination of those 71 dishes that makes it Singaporean.

For many Singaporeans, food has also become a great introduction to their country. This is how it often goes: “You know chili crab, chicken rice, or laksa? Well, they come from Singapore.”

A tiny problem is that food is an imposing and intrusive gift. Sharing the joy of food or the concept of one’s culture is great, but pressurizing others, by ways of social etiquette, to literally digest them is not. As much as chili crab is great, people like variants of them, or for some, not at all.

A recent trend in Singapore’s design scene offers a solution. Food has become a popular subject matter for local designers: From kueh tutu erasers by Winston Chai and Yong Jieyu, to Lee Shu Han’s noodle poster, and the nonya kueh sticky notes by the Singapore Souvenirs collective—there is now a spread of delicious food-inspired design products available for consumption.

image from shuhanlee.com

image from farmstore.sg

While these cannot be eaten like the real dishes, they are functional as vehicles for conversations with foreigners over what these food are and the relationships Singaporeans have with them. If it’s with a fellow Singaporean this conversation is to be had with, not a word is needed to strike a chord with that person.

It is worth noting that many of the existing designs are largely based on traditional dishes rather than corporate food brands or products. It is a positive sign that Singaporeans’ shared food memories are built around personal, cultural histories, rather than trend-driven consumerism. If the copyright wall has prevented the corporations’ participation in our nation’s narratives, may that wall never be taken down.

But many of the food immortalised thus far are Chinese and Peranakan (a community whom also share the Chinese culture). The definition of Singapore food, however, is never so restrictive. After all, one of the key things that differentiate Singaporean Chinese from their counterparts in Hong Kong and China is that the former goes gaga over roti prata, mee rebus and curry fish head—dishes that reflect the contributions of the country’s Malay and Indian culture too. More diverse representations of Singapore food in design would be more inclusive and accurate.

While food-inspired products are great as souvenirs, designers should consider the design of our food too. The nature of many Singapore dishes forbid them from becoming exquisite gifts. How do you pack bak chang, bak kwa, putu piring into one gift box and make them look like they belong with one another? What designers in Singapore have done so far is mostly taking food out of its context to create something fun and new. But how about bringing design into food packaging to serve up fresh possibilities of something familiar?

One example is the bite-size nasi lemak dumpling prototype conceived by DesignSingapore Council and the Food Innovation and Resource Center.

image from designsingapore.org

The prototype’s small size is appropriate for casual tasting, while its sealed packaging raises its potential for gifting. This is just one example of the government’s recent intiatives—holding conferences like the Singapore Food Vision 2020 and design thinking workshops—to push food and beverage businesses to incorporate design into their products.

Perhaps one day we will find, at the basement of Takashimaya, or at Changi’s departure hall, a mind-blowing array of gift set boxes comprising of this country’s pride.