Culture, Heritage, & Conservation
Culture, Heritage, & Conservation
Ongoing projects starting in AY26/27
Embedded Files
Wayfinding in Ko Kret
Wayfinding in Ko Kret
One Thai-m Wonders
Ko Kret is a riverside community in Nonthaburi, Thailand, known for its Thai-Mon heritage, pottery, temples, food and traditional arts. During our recce, we observed limited directional information, empty signboards and difficulties navigating without a guide. However, as these observations do not establish that wayfinding is a community priority, our project will first consult residents, cultural practitioners, businesses and visitors to determine whether it is a useful area for intervention.Working primarily with Master Khru Thamk and Silp Siam, we will audit one proposed route and compare repairing existing signs, improving an existing map and installing new signs. We will also seek to engage Wat Salakul School and Chulalongkorn University to support cultural co-creation, translation or contextual research.One Thai-m Wonders
Project Country: Thailand
Project Supervisor: Dr Lee Chee Keng
Group Ref: 26ADCK01R
Khao Lam Rescue Plan: Bridging Generational Gaps
Khao Lam Rescue Plan: Bridging Generational Gaps
Team Kaojai
Our project intends to equip the community with tools and skills needed to ensure sustainable tourism, mitigating the negative effects of having an influx of tourists. Since the core problem lies within the unequal power relationship between tourists and community members, we would like to assist the community at Omadal to curate the tourism experience (through guided museum and cultural showcases), and to raise awareness especially in children for interacting with tourists (through workshops). Our secondary project involves implementing lighting, either solar-powered on shared pathways along the shore or emergency search lights (depending on the community’s preference) to enhance safety.Team Kaojai
Project Country: Thailand
Project Supervisor: Dr Lee Chee Keng
Group Ref: 26ADCK02R
Bandung Baobeis
Bandung Baobeis
Bandung Baobeis
Our group intends to create a collective art book that will be presented at a collaborative art exhibition in Cibadak, working with our main community partner, Tjap Sahabat, and our specialist community partner, Kristanto Kruniwan. The art book will combine visual media such as photographs, illustrations, and maps into one cohesive visual archive that documents, shares, and preserves Cibadak’s cultural heritage for both the local community and wider audiences beyond the exhibition itself. Our team will work in two pairs and one group of three, with each subgroup focusing on one of the three visual media. We will also work alongside another IEx group, which currently intends to document and showcase its ethnographic findings through a digitised heritage trail. Although working alongside another group will require greater coordination and may potentially slow down certain stages of the project, regular communication and clearly defined responsibilities will be established to minimise duplication and delays. Ultimately, we aim to deliver the final product by the end of our IEx project timeline in November 2027.Bandung Baobeis
Project Country: Indonesia
Project Supervisor: Dr Kiven Strohm
Group Ref: 26ADKS02R
Jalan-jalan Cibadak
Jalan-jalan Cibadak
6XCG
Our project aims to document and share the history and culture of the Chinese-Indonesian community. Quite a lot of the community's heritage, including family histories, architectural traces and cultural practices of the people still remains difficult for the public to access and risks being lost over time. Thus, our project will work on creating an accessible record of Chinese-Indonesian heritage and support greater awareness and appreciation for their history and culture.Working with our community partner, Tjap Sahabat and members of the Cibadak community (one of Bandung's oldest Chinese-Indonesian enclaves), our project is to co create a heritage trail with both physical and digital components. This physical trail will guide visitors through selected heritage locations while the website version of the trail (digital aspect) would provide historical information through historical information, photographs and interactive media like audio stories, soundscapes and videos. We are also planning on involving local artists as well as heritage practitioners in shaping how these stories are represented. 6XCG
Project Country: Indonesia
Project Supervisor: Dr Kiven Strohm
Group Ref: 26ADKS02R
Ambin Ubin
Ambin Ubin
Siang's Number Wan Fans
In the past, Pulau Ubin was teeming with life, there were Malay and Chinese communities living harmoniously on the land. However, now there are only 20 full time residents on the island, most of them elderly. The descendants have all mostly to the mainland in search of better opportunity. This project's focus is to highlight the heritage of the orang pulau through the curation of a museum exhibition in collaboration with Ambin Ubin. This is important because it contrasts to previous attempts of highlighting life on the island which were not made in consultation with the local community. This would be a collection of oral stories from the residents, photographs of their life, and a history of what life used to be like there. This project aims to shed light on one of the first communites of Singapore looked like and accurately preserve their culture.Siang's Number Wan Fans
Project Country: Singapore
Project Supervisor: Ms Yueh Siang Chang
Group Ref: 26ADYS01
Running Wild @ Ubin
Running Wild @ Ubin
Ubin Kakis
Pulau Ubin, an island off Singapore's northeastern coast, is home to a fast-ageing kampong community of around 20 permanent residents, alongside former islanders and long-time visitors, who hold cultural and ecological knowledge at growing risk of being lost as the population declines. While the island's biodiversity has been documented, the everyday knowledge and practices of its people remain comparatively undocumented and hard to access.To address this, our project, Running Wild @ Ubin, partners with the National Parks Board (NParks) and the Friends of Ubin Network to launch an island-wide running event: a timed 10km race and an untimed, family-paced 5km route, held within a confirmed cap of 200 participants and volunteers across both categories. Along the routes, we plan to run experiential booths on kampong cooking, forest and herbal knowledge, and well-water drawing, hosted by residents and NParks biodiversity officers, alongside story stops built from resident interviews. Planning runs from September to November 2026, with the event and post-event handover to NParks following within the six months after. We will gather exit reflections from a sample of around 15 attendees on what they learnt, and track how many booths are led by residents and FUN rather than by us. Ultimately, we hope the event lets Ubin's residents share their knowledge on their own terms, and renews public appreciation for a heritage that is still very much alive.Ubin Kakis
Project Country: Singapore
Project Supervisor: Ms Yueh Siang Chang
Group Ref: 26ADYS02
Food for Thought
Food for Thought
The IncrEDIBLES
Singapore has long aimed to strengthen its food security and.become more self-reliant (Singapore Food Agency, 2026a). The geopolitical crises and supply shocks of this past decade have made clear the need for strategic self-sufficiency of local supply chains. Singapore’s overreliance on food imports was evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed the weaknesses of otherwise resilient food systems (Clapp & Moseley, 2020). Any long-term disruption of food shipping is existential, and the government knows this. However, we believe that in its push to augment local food resilience through technology, it has missed several other crucial perspectives on the issue: other important aspects exist such as biodiversity, culture and community.The IncrEDIBLES
Project Country: Singapore
Project Supervisor: Ms Yueh Siang Chang
Group Ref: 26ADYS03
Preserving Cham Heritage: The Western Cham Script
Preserving Cham Heritage: The Western Cham Script
Alberto's Cham-pions
The Western Cham language and script is used by the Cham people living in Cambodia. While the language is actively spoken as a home language in Cham villages, the written form of the language is less utilised by the Cham people. Despite a recent uptick in Cham literacy due to structured programs and the publication of bilingual or even trilingual (with Khmer and English) books (Brunelle & Thurgood, 2015), the Western Cham script is still under-represented, particularly in the digital space, where a lack of fonts and platform support make it difficult to render the Western Cham script on the Internet, resulting in many of the Cham people using Khmer for online communication instead.Our group aims to work with Cham-speaking community partners in Cambodia to develop new fonts for the Western Cham script. This aims to encourage greater use of the Western Cham language on the internet, which is now a big platform for communication even in the villages of Kampong Cham. In the latter phases of the project, we will use our prototype font/keyboard as a focus to develop workshops to teach the villagers how to develop their own fonts, ensuring continuity of the initiative beyond our project term.Alberto's Cham-pions
Project Country: Cambodia
Project Supervisor: Dr Alberto Perez Pereiro
Group Ref: 26CCAP02R
Historic Architecture
Historic Architecture
Alberto's Little Helpers
In the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, conservation efforts for architectural heritage disproportionately favors religious sites and sites of collective trauma in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge, while colonial-era and post-independence New Khmer Architecture style buildings are threatened with disrepair and demolition for more valuable property developments. These developments weaken the urban identity of Phnom Penh residents, especially for younger generations who inherit these spaces, undermining their sense of belonging and appreciation of heritage.We aim to advocate for community awareness and ownership of these sites as an effort towards long-term conservation, through documentation and participatory walking trails, in collaboration with our main local partners in the Institute of Technology of Cambodia and the Khmer Architecture Tours. We will be digitally documenting 15-20 sites of architectural and heritage significance on our website, and working with 5-8 young heritage storytelling creatives in our launched trail (over two runs). We hope to engage with 50 students across both tours and many more through the publicly available web resource, as a way to involve the community in the co-creation of this project, which would better enable emotional ownership and a more sustainable impact for heritage conservation in Phnom Penh beyond our project.Alberto's Little Helpers
Project Country: Cambodia
Project Supervisor: Dr Alberto Perez Pereiro
Group Ref: 26CCAP03R
Guardians of the Gozuphua
Guardians of the Gozuphua
Gibbons of PSY
In Pong Sayaen (PSY), a Karen village in Chiang Mai, the endangered Lar Gibbon is critical to both the environment as a keystone species and to culture as a cornerstone of Pga K'Nyau Karen cultural identity. However, cash-cropping is fragmenting their forest habitat, while globalisation and youth out-migration are eroding the customary taboos that once protected them.Our project aims to conserve Lar Gibbons and simultaneously protect the intricately linked Karen culture. We plan to develop a machine-learning bioacoustic model trained on gibbon call recordings collected across multiple trips to PSY, validating it by working with gibbon-call and bioacoustic experts, and aiming for an accuracy of 70%. The model will estimate gibbon numbers and locations, generating evidence to support ordination, a customary Karen forest-protection ritual, of new habitat areas to protect the gibbons’ habitat, building on the village's first ordination last year from our senior’s previous project.The machine learning model should support decision-making by providing an additional layer of evidence, making conservation and ordination decisions more informed and potentially extending beyond PSY. We hope the project can protect gibbons, renew interest in these cultural traditions, and inform alternative sources of income for local communities through conservation.Gibbons of PSY
Project Country: Thailand
Project Supervisor: A/P Peter Vail
Group Ref: 26CCPV03R
Making Singapore's Marine Conservation Visible
Making Singapore's Marine Conservation Visible
Sea you soon
Singapore’s marine environment is exceptionally biodiverse, yet opportunities to encounter and understand this biodiversity remain limited. Our project addresses this gap at Sisters’ Islands Marine Park, where our initial recce identified opportunities to improve the accessibility, interpretation, and self-guided visitor experience of the site.Working with WWF-Singapore, we will co-design a route-based, self-guided marine education experience for tertiary students. We will organise existing knowledge into a narrative sequence that helps visitors notice, understand, and connect with Singapore’s marine biodiversity. The experience will be delivered primarily through a digital component, with optional physical touchpoints such as route demarcations and displays on the island where appropriate. We will pilot the experience with tertiary students, using pre and post-experience measures to assess changes in marine biodiversity knowledge, awareness and conservation intent, alongside qualitative feedback on participants’ experiences.Along with our curriculum, we will be working with WWF to aid in their volunteer retention of their citizen scientists, strengthening the bridge between nature organisations and the community. Project longevity wise, WWF will receive a tested educational resource that can be sustained, while NParks will receive evidence-based recommendations on identified gaps. Our longer-term goal is to make Singapore’s marine biodiversity more visible, understood, and valued.Sea you soon
Project Country: Singapore
Project Supervisor: Dr Jonathan Leong
Group Ref: 26STJL01
Project Woven
Project Woven
Project Woven
Project Woven is a project that aims to raise awareness about textile weaving in Laos. Textile weaving is a culturally significant art form in Laos, but it is under-appreciated and under-noticed by the next generation and youths. Therefore, by partnering with Tai Baan, a local business that empowers women through selling their hand woven textile products, we will reach out to Lao youths through workshops. We will also be partnering with other Lao youth run organisations, such as Dana Education and NOVA101, to increase our reach and conduct these workshops. Additionally, we want to raise awareness about textile weaving. Thus we will be conducting social media workshop for Tai Baan staff to equip them with the fundamental skills to bring more awareness to this unique form of art. In sum, we hope to bring increase the appreciation and awareness of the art of weaving in Laos. Project Woven
Project Country: Laos
Project Supervisor: A/P Louis Ng
Group Ref: 26STLN04R
In the Eyes of Poto Tano
In the Eyes of Poto Tano
Gili-ty as Charged
In the coastal town of Poto Tano, tucked away in the West Sumbawa region of Lombok, the native Bajo people - also known as the “sea nomads” - make a living using marine resources and the surrounding islands of Gili Balu. However, this community faces the increasing threats of disputes over land ownership, cultural erosion and unsustainable tourism practices.Our project, “In the Eyes of Poto Tano” thus seeks to uplift this community with the help of our partners: the JARI Foundation, Women in Marine Conservation (WMC) and the Pelita fishermen. By aiding them in systematically documenting their culture, curating a museum exhibit within the existing tourism centre at Poto Tano, proposing a guided tour programme for local tourism agencies to consider and even developing a game which simultaneously functions as a collaborative research process, we hope to see the cultural and economic preservation of this community in the years to come.Gili-ty as Charged
Project Country: Indonesia
Project Supervisor: Ms Sam Shu Qin
Group Ref: 26STSQ04R
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse