For my Final Year Project at Republic Polytechnic, I got the opportunity to work on the Chingay 2026 float that will represent the South-West district. 

Overview
My team and I were tasked with helping the design and construction process of this float, ensuring that it fit the theme of Chingay 2026, 'WISH'. Aside from that, we helped with facilitation of community and school workshops to build the various float elements.

Personal Contributions 
Throughout the project, I held the role of team leader and mainly handled task delegation and the direction of the team. I would help with dictating what the team needed to focus on at the moment, distributing the workload amongst the members and myself.  This was instrumental when we needed to complete various tasks consecutively. Half the team would be assigned to focusing on the design while the rest would do material research to ensure we could get to prototyping as efficiently as we could.

Another contribution was the different concepts i was in charge of illustrating. With my background in digital  illustration, I would help develop certain aspects of the design. After deep ideations with my team members, I would take their sketches and ideas, developing them into proper illustrations to help us visualize what we would want the final product to look like.

The example provided is of the mascot's head that is featured in the front of the float. My team started off with character designs that featured star motifs but it felt too literal. Going with a merlion's head was to move in a more symbolic direction. After that was settled, I took the designs to digitize and develop further.

I created different concepts, experimenting with different hairstyles and possible colours for the head's design. After deciding on the final design, the functionality of the head was also thought out. The hair was conceptualized to be made out of tubes with lights that would display rainbow colours, the visor to be tinted dark with a half toned pattern of the character's facial expression and headphones with lights that the character wears. While the full concept was not carried forward, aspects like the colourful hair and headphones was brought forward to the final design for the float.

The third contribution that I made which helped the project would be the management while working on-site. Each day before a workshop, I would plan out the designated areas of the work site. Assigning separate workspaces for the community and student volunteers, but intermingling was still encouraged through bringing over students to sit together with the community.

At the start of the day, I would hold a small meeting with the team to delegate responsibilities to each team member and inform them of any new updates from the artists team. At the end of the day, a debrief would be held to update everyone on the tasks completed. This helped us to work with efficiency and be clear on the current progress we have completed.

Experiences and Challenges

The first thing I have learned through my experience in this project would be how to work with various creative directions. This has been the largest scale I have worked in for a project. With the scale comes a bigger team and bigger territory. The first thing I learned is that everyone will have different visions that they would want to bring to light. With this in mind, learning how to balance everyone's vision was important. Sometimes it was also better to follow the vision of the more experienced person as they would have more knowledge on how to execute the design in real life.

The second thing would be how important communication is. Working in such a big team of 5 people alongside 3 artists as part of a big project, poor communication can become an issue. Even while using apps like Telegram and Whatsapp, certain information might not be delivered to everyone. To combat this issue we decided to consolidate all our information into one group chat so everybody will be updated.

The third thing I learned is how to let go of certain ideas. Within the design process of this project, especially with the fast paced nature of it, there were a lot of ideas that were scrapped and not used. At first it was hard to let go of the ideas that I thought would lead to something good. But along the way I learned to let go of ideas that might not help bring the project forwards and move on to the next idea. This experienced changed my perspective and allowed me to widen my view when designing and not to pigeon-hole myself into a certain idea.