002 — Isabelle Lee

ISABELLE LEE

Multidisciplinary Designer & Strategist

→ Currently
At the Harvard University Graduate School of Design
A Design Researcher at the MIT AgeLab
Member of the 2025-26 Climate Leaders at Harvard University

→ Previously
Architectural Designer turned Creative Strategist.

Shaped by radical speculation at Cook Haffner (Peter Cook, Archigram), ecological rigor at Henning Larsen, social impact at TEN-Arquitectos, and experiential storytelling at Rockwell Group. I bring a multi-lens strategic lens to complex, human-centered design challenges.

Imaginative spirit cultivated at the Rhode Island School of Design

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002
Un/Making: Material Afterlives

Project Location

Kinta Valley, Malaysia

Brief

Un/Making is a design research project that examines how declining extractive rubber economies reshape land, livelihoods, and governance, using Malaysia’s rubber smallholder landscapes as a case study. As global price volatility, climate stress, and commodity transitions render large areas of plantation land economically and ecologically fragile, the project investigates how colonial production systems continue to structure contemporary rural development.

Timeline

2024 - on going

Support

The Penny White Fund Awardee (2024)
The Salata Institute for Climate & Sustainability Grant Recipient (2025)
Harvard University Asia Center - Southeast Asia Initiative Grant Recipient (2025)

Design Goals

The Challenge

Smallholder land-use practices in Malaysia’s palm and rubber plantations persist largely as inherited routines shaped by colonial production systems, limited mobility, and economic constraint. As rubber declines, these inherited practices are increasingly misaligned with ecological recovery and economic resilience.

Current transition pathways default to replacement monocrops or market-driven consolidation that reinforce the same structural vulnerabilities.

The Opportunity

Inherited practices contain embedded knowledge about land, labor rhythms, and risk management. When analyzed as systemic residues rather than ideals, these practices reveal opportunities to recompose monoculture landscapes into diversified, multi-level land-use systems that support ecological recovery, livelihood stability, and long-term climate adaptation.

The Impact

The project delivers decision-ready insights that help institutions design land-use transitions beyond monoculture replacement.

The work positions abandoned plantations as strategic testing grounds for scalable, circular land-use models across commodity-dependent regions.

Mixed Methods Approach

This project employs a multi-scalar, mixed-method design research methodology to examine land-use transitions in post-extractive plantation landscapes. It uses these methods as sensemaking instruments to identify leverage points for ecological recovery, livelihood resilience, and long-term transition.

By integrating archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, spatial mapping, and systems analysis, the project bridges historical conditions with contemporary realities. This approach moves beyond conventional agrarian studies, using design research to reframe inherited smallholder practices and extractive legacies as sites for strategic reconfiguration.

Colonial Histories

This research maps the rise and decline of major crop commodities, tracing how sugar, tin, rice, and palm oil intersected with rubber under colonial rule. It examines how economic and political forces structured territorial expansion, shaping the spatial systems that continue to govern Malaysia’s plantation landscapes.

Limits of Expansion

The expansion of palm oil presents significant ecological and systemic risks. Replacing rubber plantations reduces flexibility in future rubber supply, pushing production into new forested areas. Financing schemes that incentivize rapid conversion further accelerate monoculture expansion and ecological degradation. When expansion becomes the default response to market demand, both rubber and palm oil perpetuate extractive cycles that undermine long-term resilience.

Climate Risk and Smallholder Precarity

Global climate change intensifies economic and ecological risk for smallholder farmers. Rubber and palm oil cultivation require high nutrient inputs and long maturation periods, creating financial strain and delayed returns. As rising temperatures and erratic weather disrupt agricultural cycles, smallholders face deepening precarity within commodity-based systems.

Kinta Valley: A Transition Landscape

As rubber plantations convert to palm and durian, the Kinta Valley offers insight into how rural communities adapt to inherited infrastructures, global markets, and climate stress—positioning the landscape as a testing ground for regenerative futures.

A Catalogue of Abandoned Plantations

This catalogue assembles a comparative record of post-extractive rubber landscapes across the Kinta Valley. It translates physical conditions and everyday practices into insights about economic precarity, ecological succession, and land-use transition.
The catalogue supports reimagining abandonment as a strategic moment for recovery, restoration, and community-led intervention.
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The Lives of Things

An ethnographic lens to trace how everyday objects register economic transition at the scale of daily life. These materials document adaptation as a lived practice. It reveals how communities navigate market volatility, policy interventions, and technological change through familiar things. Read together, they form a material archive of resilience, improvisation, and lived experiences.
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