About
Afiqah designs to explore how spaces can reconnect people with each other and their environments.
Viewing design as a social practice, she is interested in its emotional and cultural dimensions, and values opportunities to collaborate across disciplines.
Remaining attentive to material narratives and processes of making, Afiqah works through observation and dialogue to design responsive, context-aware spaces grounded in connection and lived experiences.
Rooted in Healing
Set within a concealed forest in dystopian Semakau, this project proposes an alternative healing landscape rooted in herbal knowledge and sensory experience.
Organised around an open herbal garden, it offers dispersed spaces for detoxification, sensory healing, recovery and spiritual balance.
Rejecting institutional hierarchy, care is navigated intuitively through atmosphere, sound and participation, allowing individuals to engage in self-directed healing shaped by environmental, physical and physiological conditions.
This project stems from The Herbalist, a character from the City of the Disgruntled.
The Herbalist is a young botanist who was abandoned when the state withdrew from Semakau, deemed non-essential by the very system she once served. Forced to survive, she turned to the mangrove ecosystem, learning from its roots, resilience and ability to thrive in polluted, shifting conditions.
Over time, she developed her own practice of healing, grounded in her botanical training. Her house, imagined as a 'mangrove witch’s house', evolves here into a dispersed landscape of care, where concealment, adaptability and rootedness shape an alternative system of healing beyond institutional control.
SENSORY
SPIRITUAL
DETOX
Manasvi Kedia
Leong Wai En Eileen
Cao Yaqi
Ren Yiwen
Sarah Woo Kar Yann
Yin Phyo Aye Julia
