Research projects and publications

This exercise is part of a book on experiential approaches to the teaching of Human Resource Management. Specifically, in the teaching of performance appraisal, this activity fulfils three purposes: (i) for students to critique the effectiveness of an existing appraisal system; (ii) for students to suggest a set of criteria for performance evaluation; and (iii) for students to construct measurable performance indicators. This 60-minute lesson uses drama improvisations with its philosophical roots based on Paolo Freire's critical pedagogy, Augusto Boal's forum theatre, and Dorothy Heathcote's process drama.    

Citation:
Chow, Edmund. “Performance appraisal on the hotseat.” Teaching Human Resource Management: An Experiential Approach, edited by Suzanne C. de Janasz and Joanna Crossman, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018, pp. 134-144.

Social innovation involves the convergence of human involvement and contemporary society, positioning design practice as a co­creative trajectory towards implementing significant and meaningful change. The social innovation concept has expanded the scope of design’s role in society by means of fostering transparency and community involvement to produce contributions extending beyond the individual designer to impact culture and society. This humanistic perspective leads to questions of how design education should adapt and change to enhance the implications of socially conscious design and the designer’s position as social leader. Through a discussion of participatory and co­creative design, this paper attempts to identify how design education can respond to social needs through innovative solutions for social change. This paper reviews the experiential processes of design activities through a series of case studies to evaluate the impact of introducing the social innovation agenda as part of the design curriculum through collaborative and collective projects.    

Citation:
Sim, Joselyn and Harah Chon. “Social Innovation through Design. A Model for Design Education.” Cumulus Conference Proceedings Paris 2018, no. 03/18, 2018, pp. 362-381.

"Fashion content has in recent years become an open access for all to comment and contribute, becoming a language of ambiguity, fixed in rigid social and cultural roles. For many years now, it has been described by many theorists, sociologists as a complex language.
With recent advancements, we need to acknowledge the changes surrounding the language of fashion in a global interactive context. The vast majority experience fashion today is through a screen, as we scroll on social media, encountering endless global information. We have shifted from glossy magazine images, taken by professional photographers where supermodels pose while being styled, edited and retouched versus the supposedly candid snapshots of popular influencers we find on social media, that share experiences of fabricated lives, overuse hash-tagging labels and finished with love heart emojis. Do values start to shift or become lost in translation where garments are being translated from a foreign perspective and it’s meanings?

We accept that fashion is a complex system of ambiguities and even more with the developments in media technologies, fast fashion, and consumerism on the rise has created a new generation of fashion storytellers, image-makers, and curators that produce and share a pastiche of perspectives. These communicators provided the world with uninterrupted white noise, highlighting the discourse of fashion language and its many shifting values. The intent of fashion is two-fold: both informative and communicative. An audience must know what the communicator means to convey where garments are being translated from foreign perspectives and meanings something. Society needs to question the aspect of communication in these times of change, keeping in mind it is not relied upon being fully understood. In the East, we look to the West to be informed and attempt to translate the creativity into a language that we do not fully grasp, re-communicating it as a foreigner. With this research, I aim to examine the power of social media influence on fashion and how it is generating a disjuncts fashion language, the loss of knowledge and heritage across time and space, subsequently creating a local voice through craft and culture changing the global dialog of fashion."    

Citation:
Bonney, Martin. “Craft and Culture, Changing the Global Dialog of Fashion.” Fashion Futures Conference Proceedings, edited by Li Jun, Donghua University, pp. 362–370.

The Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts (ACCA) released in 1989, is widely seen as the signature document which laid the path for Singapore’s arts development in the late 20th century. It can also be seen as a logical offshoot of the Singapore government’s economic strategy which had undergone a serious review in the wake of the recession of 1985. Consequently, the “services sector” (which included the arts) was identified as a potential future growth engine for Singapore. It is important to place the ACCA Report in a historical perspective against developments in the arts and cultural scene of Singapore in the 1980s, particularly movements and activities occurring ‘on the ground’ that were driven by artists and other cultural workers. The chapter will firstly discuss the key recommendations of the ACCA Report in the context of Singapore’s arts scene then, and in view of the economic imperatives that underlie Singapore’s cultural policies, offer a perspective on how the ‘arts workforce’ has emerged and been nurtured since the 1980s, partly through stimuli from the state’s arts and education policies.     

Citation:
Wong, Audrey. "The Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts.” The State and the Arts in Singapore, edited by Terence Chong, World Scientific, 2018, pp. 111-126.