Up until this point – everyone started to evolve their opinion towards the sharing economy however, we were unable to articulate it in our designs or at least, in our presentation.
Which brought us to the fateful night in Fitzroy, hangry and nervous for our debate.
Being someone who hasn’t debated (or even dare I say properly debated) for more than five years I didn’t know how I would react or respond as a second speaker – let alone, being on the negative team I didn’t know whether I would come up with any rebuttals against the second speaker on the affirmative team.
Read MoreWeek 4 and we are diving deeper into our project. We began to focus on the issue of rising house prices. It’s so defeating to just think that our future will be bombarded with high buying prices when the job that we decided to do will not be suffice to guarantee me to accomplish owning something. On the other hand, there’s that gnawing tension between different classes, and also the loopholes of house ownership – overseas investors buying things up and the amount of investment properties accumulating overtime is terrifying.
Read MoreThis semester has been one heck of a roller coaster of self discovery and trying to understand our own position within the world of the Sharing Economy. During those twelve - thirteen weeks I've been keeping track of my weekly thoughts and reflections towards the Sharing Economy. Overall it has been quite eye-opening and it is intimidating to think that these issues really affect the way we work act and live overall. For this series I will most likely split them over in three to four parts since some entries are rather long. Overall it is a documentation of my progress over the twelve weeks.
Read MoreThis semester I have taken on an elective that requires putting your own personal spin to hand drawings. From designing interventions for a specific group of people to creating wearable architecture out of party supplies to designing a facade, it was rather cathartic to apply my own personality to these drawings (I also forgotten how much I missed hand drawing). But it was onto our third assignment when my friend and I were discussing about how we have to present our drawings that she said something that struck me.
Read More‘Love at first sight’ - it is a cliche that I am a constant victim to. Whether it’d be a quick eye contact at a party, or in a queue at the art gallery, a conference in Europe, if my heart is already missing then I know I will be spending the night trying to figure out where to meet that person again for the fatal encounter.
And it goes the same for me when I see a lovely three by three image on my Instagram feed.
Read MoreThis year, I was thrown into a world of political conflicts in the architecture field. It was a very brief glimpse of what it was like to be working in the midst of it. From event organisation to attending meetings of different committees, as if it was not obvious from the very beginning, there lives a huge political agenda behind each section of the faculty. Whether it’d be who would be running the studios to what projects can go through, or who can be part of the party the circle can become a toxic bubble - let alone those who have come across it can already become part of the degrading situation.
Read MoreI always pride myself in being Chinese - whether it’d be the culture or my family’s history, I’d always be happy to tell anybody about my background.
So you could probably imagine how gutted I was when I was told that I looked nothing like a person from Hong Kong - let alone have features that would pinpoint me to a specific province in China. I was simply a girl who carried the classic feature that would mark me as an Asian, and that I may look like I came from any part of Korea, Japan, China, Singapore…
Read MoreI loved writing before I enjoyed reading.
It took me two years and a few cases of having nobody to play with during recess and lunchtime that I was able to read pictureless novels. Before a group of boys welcomed me into their group, a pile of books was readily made next to me, waiting to keep me company for the next hour on a mint concrete floor inside the toilet stalls. Back then, I heavily relied on reading books that had images to consider the book a worthwhile read (and to have a general idea of how the novel was progressing). I guess it was because the ten year old me was still coming to grips with understanding English as I was still heavily reliant on communicating in Cantonese. This constant translating back and forth between two languages as I read a novel was taxing, moreover made it difficult for me to set up the scenes the author has crafted through text.
Read MoreThere's a fine line between morals and doing it for your own sake. Every now and then we would be presented with some kind of catch twenty two situation that could eventually haunt us a lifetime.
It's quite a morbid situation to consider really.
Last year on a trip to Venice, we spent two days at the Venice Biennale to understand the types of issues (the exhibition was titled 'Reporting from the Front') that have been raised in the past years. Issues ranged from underpayment, exploitation to poverty and social housing.
And then there was the past.
Read MoreI sat back in a daze when our lecturer for art history explained to the crowd of half awake students that women were subjects of the gaze, the muses and the inspiration for a lot of the artists and architects that are well known today. To simply put, we were the embodiment of a walking entertainment.
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