Youths
and
Heritage
As part of my guided learning module in my course of study at Polytechnic, I designed a project where I sought to find out how we can get young people to be more interested and keen on preserving our heritage.
Aim of Project
The aim of this project is to experiment different techniques of engaging youths to help them understand and appreciate the value of Singapore’s heritage. In creating projects on heritage,this project focused on promoting the understanding and appreciation of Haw Par Villa among youths.
Project Significance
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated instances of heritage businesses, crafts and sites closing down or dying out. In particular, Haw Par Villa has struggled to attract visitors.
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As the future generations of Singapore, youths will have to make decisions about Singapore’s heritage. Hence, it is important to help youths understand and appreciate the value of Singapore’s heritage.
Approach/ Methodology
The techniques that used are an experimental webinar and an Instagram campaign.
For the webinar, participants of said webinar experiment were engaged through two-way discussions between the webinar panelists and participants. This goes beyond the usual webinar format, where participants are only allowed to ask questions to the panelists or speakers.
For the Instagram campaign, social memories of people who have worked at and/or visited Haw Par Villa during different periods of its history were documented at the site. The campaign also used a character, George as the centre if attraction to the campaign.
The intention of expanding the formats of the webinar and Instagram campaign went beyond what they are usually designed to be, is to see if these expansions can better engage with youths, many of which are first encountering the issue of heritage or specifically Haw Par Villa for the first time.