Tan Yi Ting

Lives of Ephemera examines how the value of everyday printed ephemera is shaped, lost and reimagined as it moves through people’s hands and lives.

Receipts, flyers and packaging are designed to be temporary: to circulate, inform, and vanish. Yet many persist, kept for reasons that have little to do with function: memory, sentiment, habit.

This project explores how people negotiate value in what was never meant to last. Through catalogues, cultural probes and speculative artefacts, it reveals how seemingly trivial scraps become markers of habit, sentiment and lived experience.

Singaporeans often reject fruit over minor flaws, especially during Chinese New Year when mandarin oranges symbolise prosperity.

Through field observations, we saw shoppers discard imperfect fruit, which we collected to create Frankenstein—a stitched-together orange made from rejected peels.

This artefact challenges beauty standards in food and highlights unnecessary waste. After all, an orange’s worth isn’t just skin deep.