Home rituals : on dining etiquette, last-piece-syndrome & other dpmestic oddities.

• Main Author: Wong, Lydia Miao Fang.
• Other Authors: Astrid Al Mkhlaafy
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Visual arts and music::Drawing, design and illustration; DRNTU::Visual arts and music::Print media
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/52336
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

My interest is in exploring human interactions and relationships within a home, our interactions with objects, people and the environment. I’m fascinated by the private, everyday life — the mundane, the rituals and the memories contained within mattresses, chipped mugs and that forgotten corner of the fridge. We arrange around us material forms which communicate our needs of order, hierarchy and unspoken systems - especially in the sanctuary of the home. I hope to use design to articulate these systems, not as a way of solving a problem – but to generate discussion and facilitate dialogue about rituals and traditions of our private everyday life. I will be looking at the nuances of everyday life and mundane, particularly domestic, things that speak on a metaphorical level. I think there are many interesting phenomena in the house that we don’t really think about but are a reflection of the changing nature of family and culture. This project is semiautobiographical. It is a dictionary of the Wong Family living in Singapore filled with ordinary rituals that may resonate at times but seem totally bewildering at others. If most rituals are irrational, I hope my project exposes these irrationalities and absurd home practices. I am sympathetic to the absurdities of domestic life and their importance to how a family functions within a house. This is not a sleek, shiny project of glossy edges and neatly tucked in corners. It is a collection of loose pieces of domestic oddities both bizarre and unremarkable. I will attempt to understand home placebo and how the realm of the domestic can give both comfort and distress. With this project, I intend to create an art book with the several object/furniture components.