This project explores the colourful world of melamine tableware in Singapore’s hawker culture that arose in the 1970s when they were adopted by many of its food hawkers. Imagine a food centre housing 50 stalls, as a hawker you would need to differentiate your tableware so that it doesn't get mixed up with the rest during dishwashing.

A practice born out of functionality had created a rather interesting food aesthetic. In 2020, Hawker Culture in Singapore was successfully added into the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. No doubt when we think of hawker culture it is the food that reins the spotlight (I love a good Hokkien Mee), yet the tableware has been largely glossed over (I love a good Hokkien Mee on a yellow plate 😌).

In recent years, our colours has come under threat with the introduction of centralised dishwashing at hawker centres. The colours will fade slowly and surely, unless something is done about it.

This research project stems from the question –

How significant is the relationship of hawker tablewares to hawker dishes in Singaporeans’ minds?

The hypothesis is that there is significance but we need to find a way to test it reliably and at scale. In our preliminary survey, we found that 69.44% of respondents* could recall the colour of hawker ware of their favourite hawker food. It was promising, but we wanted to know whether Singaporeans think colour is important at all to our hawker culture.

*79 respondents, 19-30 years old, Q: Recall the scene of you eating (your favourite hawker) food at the hawker centre. How would you describe that scene? Can you describe the food plating?

Data collection for research is often mundane and boring. A Google Form could suffice, but there would be no element of delight and we would be limited by what the platform could provide. We wanted a more elegant method, one that weaves in storytelling and data collection.

The plan was to develop a web app that allows us to conduct this visual anthropology survey of hawker ware colours in Singapore, while at the same time illustrating the story behind our hawker colours.

Our Purpose

1. Provides us data on people’s perspectives on colour and hawker food

2. Bring out the implicit awareness of coloured wares in Singapore’s hawker food culture.

If you have read this far and are interested in giving it a try, you can access it exclusively on mobile at: www.hawkercolours.com

There are a total of 30 dishes surveyed, and we have accounted for Halal preferences to reduce confounding factors, i.e. users will only see dishes that they are likely to have tried before. As much as I would love to force everyone to go through all 30 dishes, that would be bad UX. We broke up our survey into sets of 5 dishes with the option to continue to rate more.

Seeing the effectiveness of Spotify Wrapped, I saw a parallel with how our survey could emulate that. Being able to share amongst inner social circles could create the buzz marketing we needed to encourage existing users to rate more while increasing our pool of new users.

The Cherry on Top

As a fun way to end the survey, users can explore what colours others have rated for each dish, filtering further based on the demographic data we collected from them previously.

Our benchmark was The Pudding. Their execution of data scrollytelling is beautiful and I can spend hours being amazed at the talent.

Besides the survey, the website also features stories about the cultures and histories surrounding hawker colours. They include hawkers and consumers sharing their colour choices, a history of melamine tableware adoption in Singapore and how the phenomenon gave rise to one of the largest local manufacturer of such tableware.

Photography and Videos by Cai Rui Rong

Media Coverage

Published by In Plain Words and designed by Currency, our print edition features the content from the webapp and a data visualisation of the results.

The Hawker Colours book can be purchased here.

Read a feature about the book by The Straits Times and Lianhe Zaobao.

Book Photography by Lim Zerherng