I am a multidisciplinary design strategist and researcher with seven years of experience in the built environment, turning research on climate, material circularity, and emerging technology into regenerative spaces for all living things that depend on them.
I am a multidisciplinary design strategist and researcher with seven years of experience in the built environment, turning research on climate, material circularity, and emerging technology into regenerative spaces for all living things that depend on them.
DESIGN RESEARCHAfterlives: Fieldwork on Abandoned Rubber Land
2024
Perak, Malaysia
The Penny White Project Awardee (2024)
The Salata Institute for Climate & Sustainability Grant Recipient (2025)
Harvard University Asia Center - Southeast Asia Initiative (2025)
A design research project that examines how declining extractive rubber economies reshape land, livelihoods, and governance. 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.
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.
Inherited practices contain embedded knowledge about land, labor rhythms, and risk management. When analyzed as systemic networks, 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.
This project employs a multi-scalar, mixed-method design research methodology as sensemaking instruments to identify leverage points for ecological recovery, livelihood resilience, and long-term transition.
Current crop transition pathways optimize for short-term land productivity at the expense of long-term resilience
80 interconnected variables across seven dimensions
As rubber plantations convert to palm oil and durian, Perak offers a case study in how rural communities adapt to inherited infrastructure, global markets and climate stress.
Perak is a landscape designed by colonial extraction, where a century of tin mining and rubber planting set the patterns of ownership, labor and infrastructure.
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This catalogue assembles a comparative record of post-extractive rubber landscapes across the Kinta Valley.
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Many of Perak’s villages began as Kampung Baru, settlements the colonial government established during the communist insurgency of the mid-20th century and planned around rubber production.
[Left: Tanjung Tualang, Right: Sungai Durian]
Through material traces and everyday objects, community members demonstrate how they navigate economic uncertainty, government programs, technological change, and socioecological shifts.
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