The Joy Of Making

Through her curious apparatus named Mass Production of Happiness, multidisciplinary designer Yingxuan Teo invites us to discover the hands-on experience of creating soap at home and rethink how we consume it.

- Asih Jenie

Running from mid-December 2020 to early January 2021, Visions of The Future: Design in a Pandemic State of Mind was the first live exhibition held at the National Design Centre since the Covid-19 restrictions were eased. Eight emerging local talents presented design concepts that thoughtfully reimagined the new normal and addressed how design can help us thrive in a challenging time. One of these concepts was Mass Production of Happiness, a curious glass apparatus multidisciplinary designer Yingxuan Teo invented to produce soap at home.

HOW DID MASS PRODUCTION OF HAPPINESS COME TO BE?

It was my graduation project at Design Academy Eindhoven in 2018. The school gave me the freedom to shape my design brief and to express who I was as a designer.

My project addresses three issues: a happy mind, a happy body and a happy earth. I wanted to work with soap because it is an item we use every day. It is also fairly simple to make yet mass-produced liquid soap generates a staggering amount of plastic waste.