About
Singa-Lore
Problem Statement
Young Singaporeans are self-learners when it comes to the history and heritage of Singapore, and need more effective, experiential ways of learning about and engaging with their heritage.
The current reliance on traditional classroom-based teaching approaches results in a diminished understanding of Singapore's heritage, which undermines their sense of identity, belonging, and well-being.
User Interviews
'Cherry'
- Visual markers of heritage captivate me most, then lead me to the ‘small text’ (if there is any) — for example, the info boards found at important monuments or at museum exhibits…
- I don’t read up on Singapore’s heritage and history that actively, but if there’s an info board at a hawker centre for example, I’d probably read it expecting it to be interesting...I recall some MRT stations have inscriptions or text on their walls sharing more about their history too, it might be Chinatown or Maxwell
'Terry'
- There is something to be said about the physicality of [built] heritage…being able to see and feel it, and perceive that you are in the same space as it
- What I learnt about heritage was through classrooms and textbooks — occasional field trips, maybe. Nevertheless, they couldn’t engage me, even the field trips…we kept hearing about the same few places and names again and again, like Sir Stamford Raffles
- On the other hand, later on in life, when I volunteered at a museum, and experienced certain guided tours through areas like Kampong Glam by residents of the area, I heard more bite-sized, personal bits of history and heritage from the very people who live there.
Secondary Research
Our Singapore Heritage Plan
[...] our heritage can be found all around us and experienced in our daily lives. Heritage is embodied in places such as historic buildings, sites and museums [...]
[...] our museums and heritage institutions [must] continue to take advantage of the latest digital trends, and work with partners to present their content in innovative ways, to create rich, meaningful experiences.
The Straits Times: Are traditional games and old building names part of Singapore’s heritage? Age may determine your answer
Asked what comes to mind when "Singapore heritage" is mentioned, [...] seniors aged 55 and older listed [...] the names and stories of old builings and monuments
[...] because of digital consumption, the yonger generation has a broader view of what heritage constitutes [...] the younger generation are self-learners.
IPS Survey on the Perceptions of Singapore's Built Heritage and Landmarks
Each individual living in Singapore has a stake in built heritage too, and can benefit from incorporating it more consciously into social life, by understanding more about its history [...] This can translate to a stronger sense of collective solidarity, as reflected in the positive relationships between valuing heritage and national identity found across all ages.
Solution
While reading more about the problem, I made 3 observations, which also served as assumptions or hypotheses to guide the design of my solution:
- Built heritage can serve as physical and experiential reminders of history, especially if accompanied by resources and information on their significance.
- Repeated, bite-sized, accumulated experiences best strengthen knowledge and understanding (compared to standalone field trips).
- Most young Singaporeans today also have access to a device (particularly smartphones).
Based on these hypotheses, I reasoned that a mobile app could be a fun, handheld heritage companion for the everyday Singaporean youth.
Features
When location services are turned on, the app could provide push notifications on areas, streets, and places of interest the user visits or passes by in their everyday lives. These push notifications will include snippets of history or interesting tidbits on the everyday places visited by users - for e.g., the history behind street names, significant events, cultural symbols in the landscape. The app could also one day be able to crowdsource currently unrecorded stories, events, or memories from users to augment Singapore's existing heritage databases.
This is a web app prototype of this mobile app solution.
The site asks you for permission to know your current location. Based on your location, it provides you with pop-ups on places near you and their histories. As a secondary feature, you can also explore more of Singapore's places and histories through an interactive map found on the site — for example, if you've already cycled through the pop-ups on all of the streets/places with historical data near you.
Data
I used Streets and Places data from data.gov.sg.
Roadmap
Other potential improvements I would explore if I had more time include:
- Optimising for mobile; some of the interactive features (e.g. location-based pop-ups on places with interesting histories near you) don't work on mobile browsers yet. Enabling this would bring the product closer to the initial intended end-outcome — a mobile heritage companion.
- Cleaning up the Streets and Places dataset to increase the quality of heritage information; some datapoints are quite brief, and may not be as substantial or of interest to users
- Incorporating other sources of data on Singapore's streets and places to supplement the current data
- Embedding a search function within the interactive map, so users may filter for tidbits on specific places or areas
- Enabling users to contribute their own historical facts, heritage tidbits, or multimodal archives (e.g. photographs, recordings) tagged to locations to supplement the existing data
This is a TechUp project by Priya ([email protected]), developed in May 2024.
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