School of Design
Communication
Johnson Tan
Johnson is always keen to learn and work with people from different disciplines because, as Neri Oxman's Krebs Cycle of Creativity explains, in our own disciplines we lack understanding. He loves to initiate practice-based research that involves materiality, design, science and technology. Inspired by Oxman's notion of material ecology, where materials are not as separated as we think they are, Johnson is interested in exploring how a concrete jungle such as Singapore could optimise materials better.
Work
shell decay
The project utilises Singapore’s climatic environment and waste materials as conditions to examine the behaviour and the process of decay. Decay, typically seen as an end-of-life material treatment, is brought to the earlier stages of processing materials, replacing the world of parts with a circular economy. Striving to replace ready-made materials with the abundance of waste produced in Singapore, the project promotes the notion of optimising rather than maximising.
