Tan Wei Ming's Portfolio

The increasing life expectancy forces us to reconsider established lifecycles. We introduce age-fluidity as a design strategy to enable well-being for all. We reshape the urban environment to allow people to feel the age they want.

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In current society, age is directly linked to a specific life stage. However, age is an individual experience - linked but ultimately independent from the social constructs that define its boundaries.The social stigmas around age are a symptom of the age categorisation. As our life expectancy increases, it is time to rethink the artificial boundaries that determine what it means to be a ‘child’, ‘adult’, or ‘elderly’.

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We introduce interventions that reference the many ways in which children interact with the city: A bush becomes a place to explore nature, a handle becomes a mothers comforting hand, and a pavement becomes a playground. By conducting these experiments in Singapore, we intend to open a dialogue between urban mobility and age - to provoke a curiosity within public space.

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Age-fluidity can be implemented as design strategy at multiple scales - from the building to the handrail. These simple, joyful interventions allude to a world in which we can curate our stages of life, promoting curiosity, creativity and playfulness at any age. Fluid age design can thereby become the first step towards a significant shift in the social constructs of age - from a universal to a personalised, fluid definition of life.