d+a | Issue 116 • Jun/July 2020

93 the house set up this can-do spirit,” she shares. Ample playground time after school with neighbours also benefitted. “The make-belief, unstructured play is a very design mind set; you need to take what is available to you and then create your own rules, find the game within that,” she espouses. At the National University of Singapore’s Division of Industrial Design (NUS DID), she happily supplemented design classes with cross-faculty modules in astrophysics and film. But in her third year, she transferred to London’s Central Saint Martins (CSM) on a Design Singapore Council (Dsg) scholarship, upon advice of mentors who told her that to be a good designer, she had to see the world. CSM’s variegated design disciplines supplied depth of design knowledge but the city proved to be the hidden school. She patronised its countless museums and exhibitions, and travelled nearby to explore the Milan Furniture Fair and Paris’ Nuit Blanche. “It’s like a smorgasbord of experiences and influences, which was formidable in shaping my early twenties, forming my creative identity,” she says. There, she thrived, graduating with First Class Honours. Fame came early with her thesis project – a trio of Limited Edition Dolls (Zaha Hadid, Karim Rashid, Jaime Hayon) as a tongue-in-cheek observation of the cult of design. It was widely featured and earned her a guest illustrator opportunity for international design magazine Icon. CHILD AT HEART For Lee, stepping out of her comfort zone aids creative growth. After working for London-based designer Sebastian Bergne, she joined the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), employing design thinking to help grow the consumer-facing business sectors. In 2013, she took a leap of faith, establishing her eponymous studio. It was the right move, allowing her to explore multifarious avenues including furniture design, scenography and brand communications that fed her restless nature and consolidated her brand. What delights her most is how she is able to continue doing what she enjoyed as a child, albeit on a different scale. “I realised that scenography and comic book- design are similar; the windows are like sequences of comic panels. “A large part of it is actually storytelling and how to compose a scene to tell a story very quickly,” she explains. Her fascination with machinery and processes found their way into projects for Hermès and The Marvellous Marble Factory for SingaPlural 2015 that had her serving up confectionery imitations made from natural stone on a conveyor belt. Lee highlights Rube Goldberg’s illustrations of fantastical contraptions she discovered behind a cereal box as a child. “I think, in a way, I still want to be that inventor,” she muses. “I really love that kind of absurdity and humour. I would take apart and reassemble LEGO and Meccano sets, aspiring to make these machines.” As a designer, she’s able to do just that, inventing for clients like Bank of Singapore, Samsung and The Balvenie. Moving on, perhaps, a hotel, the interior of a space ship or an entirely new vision to address pertinent issues such as sustainability? How these would look like through Lee’s wild and witty lens is something we can’t wait to explore.