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2025:
At Home with Work is an architectural essay film translating research on home-based work into public scholarship. Developed from the SSRC-funded research project “Foundations for Home-Based Work” led by Dr Lilian Chee, the film reveals how Singapore's younger residents creatively negotiate and adapt domestic spaces for paid labour, care and family life. Combining architectural analysis with lived experience, the film makes visible the gendered and affective dimensions of work, challenging conventional separations between home and workplace.
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Directors
Dave Lim & Adar Ng
Executive Producer
Lilian Chee (PhD)
Producer
Woong Soak Teng
Colourist
Eugene Seah
Sound Design
Nathaniel Mah
Poster Design
Goh Sze Kei
Marcus Loh
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CONCEPT & DEVELOPMENT
Concept Lead
Lilian Chee (PhD)
Creative Direction
Lilian Chee (PhD)
Script Advisor
Jane M Jacobs (PhD)
Research Assistants
Liyana Doneva
Rachel Sim
With thanks to
Social Science Research Council, Singapore Ministry of Education, Singapore
Department of Architecture, NUS
Yale-NUS College
Department of Communications and New Media, NUS
Michelle Yeo
At Home with Work is a component of Foundations for Home-based Work: A Singapore Study
A research project supported by the Ministry of Education, Singapore, under its Social Science Research Thematic Grant (MOE2020-SSRTG-032)
Project No. A-0008463-01-00
Ethics Approval Code: NUS-IRB-2021-799
Principal Researcher
Lilian Chee (PhD)
Co-Researchers
Jane M Jacobs (PhD)
Audrey Yue (PhD)
Natalie Pang (PhD)
At Home with Work (2025) is a hybrid essay film that brings architectural ethnography into dialogue with documentary filmmaking. A component arising from Foundations for Home-Based Work, a four-year national study of Singaporean home-based workers and their domestic environments, funded by the Social Science Research Thematic Grant (SSRTG), the film translates architectural ethnographic research into cinematic inquiry. Attentive to the spatial and temporal rhythms of everyday life, it reads thresholds, tools, storage, light and domestic arrangements as material evidence of homes continually reconfigured to accommodate work. Interweaving the lives of four workers, the film reveals recurring negotiations over space, time and livelihood, and the inseparable entanglement of paid labour with the unpaid reproductive work of cooking, cleaning and care that sustains it, often undertaken by other household members.
What emerges is a portrait of aspiration and agency. Each young Singaporean has departed from conventional trajectories of stable employment and prescribed achievement to pursue something less certain but more self-authored: autonomy, meaningful work, proximity to family and a different rhythm of life. Their homes accommodate these ambitions while absorbing their pressures, including the growing demand to render private lives visible as consumable content. Through an architectural ethnographic lens, the film reveals domestic space not as a passive backdrop but as an active, affective condition through which livelihoods, relationships and identities are continually made and remade. Neither refuge nor workplace alone, here the home is a flexible infrastructure of economic production and social reproduction. At Home with Work asks what happens when homes increasingly absorb our working lives, and who bears the invisible costs of sustaining the delicate balance between livelihood and care.

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