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Where It All Began

Excerpt from Hans Tan:

Vibrant and diverse describe not only Singapore’s hawker food but also the tableware that holds them. Colourful melamine plates and bowls have been the standard at hawker centres since the government started a programme in the 1970s to build such cooked food centres across the country to rehouse hawkers that used to ply the streets. Every hawker picks their own tableware and colours mainly to distinguish what is theirs from what is not, giving rise to the use of blue, green, red, purple, yellow and many more coloured tableware in one hawker centre. Few places in Asia boasts such density of melamine tableware usage and colour variety across the country.

This phenomenon is, however, changing. New generation hawker centres built from 2015 onwards, have adopted centralised dishwashing and standardised tableware along with it. They typically use just two or three different colours to differentiate the tableware for Halal, non-Halal and vegetarian stalls. The attempt to tackle a longstanding manpower crunch in the hawker and cleaning industries, inadvertently threatens to dilute a very colourful and prominent aspect of Singapore’s hawker culture.

Should tableware colours be considered as part of Singapore’s UNESCO-inscribed hawker culture? Do consumers associate their favourite hawker dishes with particular colours? To explore these questions about our relationship with hawker food and the coloured plate that frames it, a visual anthropological online study surveys the public. The ongoing survey data can be visualised, and results are published in a book.

Where was I in all this?

I was just a person in this big team of talented people, from designers to programmers to writers. The developer team started small, with just me and Kesh trying to figure out this huge ask of a website: a fully-custom, interactive survey website.

Thankfully, I managed to recruit my friend Shaun into this and also Yuan Jie. With help from Stacey and Shaun, we trudged through weeks and weeks of work tracked on Jira. The process took months, from trying things out on Webflow, to plain Javascript, and ending up with a completely new framework to me, React.js. The whole experience was tiring, but a fruitful learning experience, where I also became confident in React, as well as web development in general, I became much better at flex layouting.

The survey portion required a lot of tweaking, from my early explorations into “caching” data in browser’s local storage, then to Airtable API, and to land on Supabase. The desired interaction on the list options are as recorded above, which was really difficult to implement as there aren’t any good framework with this kind of interaction, which means it is a fully custom component. Based on a carousel component on Mantine UI library, Shaun managed to make it work somewhat well. I then took how he does it and apply it to other parts of the site that needs the functionality as well.

From the whole experience, I learned one thing for sure, I may not be the best programmer yet due to my lack of experience, however I’m good at “yoink and twist“. I understand other people’s codes quickly and I am able to internalise the concepts to apply it into other applications. This extends beyond just programming, but I digress.

As a designer, I also made sure to keep the code and component consistent across pages and features, meticulously checking the arrows and dropdowns. Every spacing and layout for all 20+ story elements were also checked by me, mostly layout by myself too, to be fair. Overall I am proud that my small little contribution has reached people in the thousands – that is fascinating to me until now.

What’s next for Hawker Colours?

The data from the survey is then collated and displayed in the Hawker Colours: Melamine Tableware in Singapore book, written and published by In Plain Words. The book contains research, interviews, stories, and a historical look into the history of melamineware in Singapore. For some food, as the survey finds after receiving 1400+ responses, the distinction is clear that it is strongly associated with a certain tableware colour.

The book has been featured by The Straits Times and Lianhe Zaobao.