The influence of early 20th century philanthropists Tan Kah Kee and Lee Kong Chian continues to be felt in Singapore and across Asia. In 2008, gsmprjctºcréation created an exhibition held at the National Library of Singapore that focused on the civic responsibility assumed by these two men by comparing and contrasting their biographies in a novel fashion.
Facing an unfortunate lack of collection to display, the design approach was mainly graphic. Expressing the men’s parallel and at times intersecting biographies were two coloured lines — representing each of the two men — that ran throughout the exhibition, guiding visitors through sections pertaining to the men as individuals, and coming together where the two contemporaries influenced or collaborated with each other.
The four galleries each focused respectively on the origins of the two men’s wealth, their contributions in the area of education, the groups of people they mobilized and finally, the abstract notions of legacy, cause, involvement, civic duty and philanthropy. The solution gsmprjctº put forward to this last gallery’s challenge involved large-scale information and interactive graphics, such as the room-sized graphic of coloured circles representing each beneficiary that dramatically expressed the sheer mass of institutions that benefited from the support of these two men. To impart messages encouraging civic responsibility among the audience, gsmprjctºcréation developed two interactive graphics. The first challenged visitors’ civic priorities, recording and displaying the resulting reactions, while the second asked visitors to assess other resources like free time, skills and interests. A series of sliding doors revealed suggestions as to what one could do with these resources.