The Culture of Convenience in Asia
While convenience is a part of our lives in developed nations, from washing machines to Starbucks, it has never been so apparent as in Asia. The culture of convenience can be said to be a powerful force shaping lives and economies of Asia. In the beginning of March, we attended the Singapore Design Week and simultaneously held meet-and-greet sessions in the BoConcept stores both in Singapore and Hong Kong. We’ve been working with BoConcept since June 2016. The Athena armchair was our first collaboration with BoConcept and has been a success ever since. Is this culture of convenience a result of the fastest growing economic region?
Meet-and-greet session at BoConcept store in Singapore
1. Eating out is the norm
Compared to the Netherlands where we normally pack a boterham(sandwich), 26% of people in Hong Kong eat away from home once a day or more frequently. The entire social network in Asia can be said to be built around food. In Singapore, you can find the world’s cuisines condensed in a small country; French cuisine and Indian cuisine are at arm’s length from each other. We’ve never seen a culture that appreciates food as much as in Asia. Needless to say, food is a form of art. From the street vendors who sells soup dumplings out of a steaming basket to the Michelin-starred restaurants, food is an artistic expression presented in all forms and tastes.
Xiao long bao dumplings at Jing Hua Xiao Chi, Singapore
Our favorite location for food, Maxwell Food Court, is an entire cultural institution, a hawker center full of good, diverse dishes including the world-famous Laksa and Chicken Rice. Eating out at a hawker center is not only a taste bud treat, but a bargin on the budget. A dish can be as cheap as €1,50. Ask any Singaporean what their favourite past time is and 80% would say eating. Yet, the hawker trade is in crisis. The median age of a Singaporean hawker is 59 years old, and many have hawked for more than 40 years, inheriting the trade from their parents. However, very few of these current hawkers’ children desire to take over their parents’ trade as it involves very long hours and commitment. The Singaporean government is now doing their best to ensure the continuation of this culture, setting up a Hawker Centre 3.0 Committee to give recommendations for a more sensible road map preserving Singapore’s hawker culture.
Maxwell Food Court, Singapore - Dining on Dollars
This can be compared to the furniture industry in Europe where specialized skills like leather working, stitching, upholstery are disappearing; furthermore imports are gaining more popularity than homemade products. How can we keep younger Europeans still interested and eager to learn these disappearing skills? We believe that educational institutions have a very special role to play. The Dutch government is now considering to bring trade schools back to the educational landscape. At Studio Schrofer, we work with educational institutions employing enthusiastic interns and teaching them the entire process of furniture production and how these specialized skills play an important role in our nation’s furniture design.
2. Interior decorators commonly engaged
Asia dominates as an outsourcing location from everything from IT to call centers, and they also tend to outsource many of their tasks. The numbers of foreign domestic helpers, for example, have soared across the Asia-Pacific region. These foreign domestic helpers assist families with housework, childcare, and elderly care. In Europe, we tend to take care of home interior ourselves, from painting to flooring to landscaping. What we discovered in Asia was that most people tend to use the services of professional interior decorators. Both BoConcept Hong Kong and BoConcept Singapore feature interior design service to help clients put together furniture pieces for their living space. It works by customers giving a baseline or a budget and the rest is given to the stylist to fill in. From this, we gathered that Asians are more inclined towards timeless design as they also move less often as compared to their European counterparts. Secondly, this could also be due to the seasonal weather: In Hong Kong, you have a milder winter compared to the Netherlands, and in Singapore, it’s tropical season all year round.
In both Hong Kong and Singapore, your home is a reflection of your social status. This is probably also why they prefer to entrust the presentation of their masterpiece to a professional. There’s no wonder why a Hong Kong-based interior designer was named the world’s best interior designer. Joyce Wang is a 35-year-old designer who designed for the Xintiandi penthouse in Shanghai, Mott 32 restaurants, Mandarin Oriental Hyde park, The Residences at Mandarin Oriental Bangkok.
3. Strong focus on consumers
We cannot help but noticed that Asia is a really customer-oriented region. From the toothbrush set with mini toothpaste in hotel rooms, to the pre-packaged spices where you can cook-at-home the delicacies from Singapore in the comforts of your home. Consumer goods are packaged with the consumers’ convenience in mind as the most important element: one time use instant coffees, teas, soaps, toothpastes are only a few of the dizzying array of convenience products available.
Such customer-oriented attitudes presents a crisis of convenience. Without proper waste management systems and policies in place, convenience comes at a cost for this region. Nonetheless, Asian countries are making strides toward saving the environment with China being the strongest enforcer of curbing single-use plastic in the region. In Singapore, members of the Parliament calls on the government to cut use of single-use plastic.
At Studio Schrofer, sustainability is at the heart of our design process. We want to work with market leaders and innovators to produce designs that are comfortable, elegant, and sustainably made.
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Our goal at Studio Schrofer is to speak to the heart of our customers with elegant and comfortable furniture designs that express their individuality — at home, garden or office. It starts with a love for the human body, a respect for the home environment, and knowledge of materials, construction, and form. We achieve these goals by engaging in a dialogue between designer and manufacturer, designer and craftsman, designer and global citizens. Frans Schrofer, the Founder and CEO, values simplicity, practicality, beauty, resourcefulness and state-of-the art technologies. Studio Schrofer’s modern furniture designs are rooted in these values.
