Below you can find information about some previous IEx projects and your seniors' experiences. Click the pages for more info and pictures!
1. The project targets tertiary education students in Singapore. These students were chosen because research indicates that climate literacy among young adults is relatively low, leading to unsustainable consumption and commuting behaviors. We hope to expand it to a larger target group in the future.
2. The project is a collaboration between the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Land Transport Authority (LTA) of Singapore. LTA is interested in promoting sustainable commuting behaviors and sees this project as a complementary effort to its infrastructure and policy initiatives.
3. The project employs prediction markets as a tool to increase climate literacy and awareness of sustainable commuting choices. A digital prediction market platform will be developed where students make climate-related predictions and are incentivized to learn through financial rewards and psychological mechanisms (like loss aversion).
Working with a community garden/farm located in Everton Park, Singapore. We are working directly with the farmers in the space but during this process we have had to interact with the surrounding social institutions such as the Resident's Committee and Community Centre. The majority of our project was directed toward granting the farmers a degree of political sovereignty as the space had undergone cyclicing support/pushback from government organisations, both at a national and local level. We worked from the ground to understand and map the complex and political dynamics present within the space whilst establishing a strong repoir with the farmers. Toward the end, we turned inward, implementing and planning for social design elements within the social space.
We are doing coral restoration in the northern coast of Bali, Les Village, with the partner organisation Sea Communities. We’re investigating an alternative substrate for coral restoration, using coconut fibres. We also are writing a storybook to promote ocean literacy targeted at school kids in both Bali and in Singapore! It was inspired by the fishermen we work with and will be about corals and alternative livelihoods of coastal communities. Beyond that, we’re also creating data visualisation codes to better understand the data that’s been collected from citizen science programmes at our partner organisation over the years. This is helpful to sieve out if / which restoration methods have been effective.
1. Working with elephant caretaking communities in Northern Thailand. Focused primarily on a Karen community in Mae Chaem District, Chiang Mai where elephants have been taken care by multiple generations of the family over 200 years. As part of our project, we also speak with and feature stories of elephant caretaking from private elephant businesses (Patara Elephant Farm, Mae Sa Elephant Camp) and elephant vets (from Chiang Mai University).
2. Huay Pakkoot Elephant Community Foundation, Patara Elephant Farm, Mae Sa Elephant Camp, Chiang Mai University.
3. We are creating a photobook to feature personal stories related to elephant care in Northern Thailand. This is to help shed light on elephant care beyond the elephants and the care practices themselves to understand the human stories and motivations behind caring for elephants.
Our group's project is about elephant conservation and ecotourism. We are working with the Pakinyaw village of Huay Pakkoot in the mountains of Chiang Mai. We are working with a local foundation, founded by the villagers and mahouts of Huay Pakkoot. Specifically, in terms of direction, we are helping to record and document the culture and biodiversity of the village, which we are helping to integrate into their tourism model. To this end, we have helped to install signboards, create documentaries, food menus, and nature guides which the community guides can use to improve the tourist experience. Overall, our aim is to increase tourism footfall at the village to ensure they can become economically self-sufficient through the tourism industry.
1. We are working with a community in Tra Vinh, Vietnam, with the goal of introducing a sexuality education curriculum for the children in the village.
2. We are working with Eco Vietnam Group (EVG), an NGO whose mission is to provide quality and accessible education to children in rural vietnam.
3. We are currently working on a storybook to teach children about sexuality education in an approachable way, and we are covering topics such as consent, harassment, and human anatomy.
Our group is working with caregivers of children with intellectual disabilities in Singapore. We are currently working with MINDS, an organisation that specialises in taking care of people with intellectual disabilties. They have been extremely helpful in connecting us to different caregivers, allowing us to interview them and get a better view into their world. We are currently working on an application that could help these caregivers form a community, be more informed of events conducted by MINDS and get the necessary help. We hope that this application helps them to alleviate the burden of being a caregiver, by letting them know that they are not alone!
Our group is working with a fishing unit in Sungai Batu (south of Penang) which is affected by the Silicon Island land reclamation project, in conjunction with an environmental NGO, JEDI. Our project seeks to address the potential erasure of the Penang coastal fishermen’s cultural heritage from land reclamation, as well as counter negative stereotypes of the fishermen, through documentation of their fishing practices and culture.
For our IEx project, we collaborated with the coastal community of Desa Budeng in Jembrana, Bali. This village is home to a rich mangrove forest, providing an abundance of natural resources. Through SeaCommunities, we connected with the local community to explore partnership opportunities. Our project focuses on mangrove conservation by repurposing mangrove plant scraps into profitable, usable products. Working closely with Desa Budeng, we source ground propagules—created by cutting, drying, and grinding propagules harvested from propagated mangrove trees—and use propagule extract to produce mangrove jelly.
1. the stateless villagers of Kampung Air in Semporna, Sabah
2. working closely with the students of Borneo Komrad, and also in conversation with government entities MDS (Majilis Daerah Semporna) as well as the organisation Amwil (in charge of waste collection in Semporna)
3. we built waste bins and set them up in strategic locations around the village, we also set in place a systme together with borneo komrad for waste collection.
We implemented a net barrier as a potential solution to relieve the plastic waste management issue on the flowing waters of the Semporna kampungs in Sabah, Malaysia. Having built a net barrier underneath the bridge in Kampong Ayer, the goal was to stop the flow of tourist and local trash from flowing throughout the kampungs. Further steps are encouraged to continue on with this initiative, where efficient tools can be built to collect the accumulated trash in front of the net, or collaborate with local organizations like Borneo Komrad and Amwil to find a routine and collective project to reuse the plastic trash.
Void decks used to be a quintessential part of Singaporean public housing but are now, more often than not, spaces left un(der)used. Identifying a void deck in the ageing community of Bukit Purmei, we investigated the reasons behind its underutilisation and developed game programmes to encourage the use of the void deck. The project culminated in the creation of an original board game. We worked mostly independently with the support of the Residents' Network.
We have chosen the community of Cigondewah, which is a village an hour away from Bandung city in Indonesia. The village used to be focused on rice farming, then focused on textile production, but now due to industrialisation, they are mainly working in plastic recycling factories. These factories have caused major pollution in the village, and the people are fighting against this in their own way. We worked with Imah Budaya, a community centre founded by Indonesian artist Tisna Sanjaya, where they provide a place for many events like art workshops, kindergarten sessions and more. On our recce trip, we spoke to many people to hear their stories and concerns. While many people were doing their own part to fight the direction that the village was going in, they were very concerned about their traditions being lost and the future of their children and their education. Seeing this, we decided to create children's storybooks based on folktales to help preserve their culture and help them educate their children. We also created a cultural map to keep records of these individuals and their remarkable efforts, to be added on to by the community.