Project description (150-250 words)

Over 19 weeks, Project Commune ventured to redesign migrant workers’ living environment to unlock a higher quality of life, community engagement, and collective ownership of the dormitory experience.

Covid-19 has exacerbated the need for the living situations of migrant workers (MWs) in Singapore to evolve, but simply issuing new dormitory specs would focus too narrowly on infrastructure alone. Agency has set out to work with DASL to create a live “show flat” prototype that sets a new direction for the space, tools, and roles to serve the collective needs of the dormitory ecosystem.

At the end of the experiment, we published our collective learnings from the project as a series of distributed handbooks for DASL operators and managers. It presents a new direction for operators to create the conditions to improve quality of life and encourage positive community behaviours in migrant worker dormitories, through the design of the environments, with the use of new tools, conducted by new roles.

While the handbook is thorough, it serves more as guidelines and less as a rulebook, for dormitory design and management. Readers are encouraged to use it to reflect on their own roles, their organisational structures and processes and their relationship with residents, to make a call on what should and can be applied to their dormitories and ultimately contribute to better outcomes in their own way for their people and those migrant workers that they house and serve.

Both dormitory operators and government policymakers are already using the handbook to enact and implement change from both a macro and micro lens.

Setting the right groundwork by rethinking how we think about residents and defining what good dorm management looks like

• Understanding residents as behavioural types to support, instead of by demographic
• Identifying and recognising the characteristics of successful dormitory managers

Distilling 3 core insights that frame our design approach

Support your residents’ unique cultural dormitory ecosystem.

The design of each dormitory is different; efforts to build community from top down are futile as each environment is unique.

Treat your residents as the long-distance husbands, fathers and sons that they are.

Your dormitory is not merely a residence for Singapore’s foreign labour. It is a temporary home, an important place of growth, for hard-working providers who have traveled a long way to support their families.

Design the dormitory experience for year 3, not week 1.

Despite the collective desire to make the dormitories a ‘home away from home’, efforts have been laser-focused on the week 1 experience instead of long term needs, resulting in your residents ‘hacking’ the system.