[Re]District: Designing with Upcycled Materials

Instructors:

[Re]District is a collaborative, hands-on design workshop where participants will imagine the city of tomorrow through the act of kitbashing (reassembling fragments of existing work into new and unexpected futures). 

Working in interdisciplinary teams, participants will explore how discarded materials can give rise to new ideas, forms, and narratives about the urban environment. 

Each team will develop a speculative “district” within a shared urban landscape, responding to one of five overarching themes.  Together, these districts will form a collective city model as an evolving and imperfect reflection of our shared imaginations, concerns, and hopes for what lies ahead. 

This workshop invites participants to think differently about design, to see value in the overlooked, and to collaborate across scales and disciplines from the architectural to the ecological to the object-based.

Workshop Format:

Introduction within Groups (5 mins):  Students join groups as assigned and workshop facilitators highlight prompts.

Design Production (50 mins):  Teams use upcycled materials, including architectural models (AKI), landscape drawings (BLA), and industrial design lab offcuts (DID), to collaboratively construct their district.  Each group should work intuitively, combining fragments through kitbashing and collage to generate new forms, typologies, and narratives.

City Assembly & Sharing (20 mins):  Teams gather their districts into a single collective urban model, reflecting the intersections between disciplines and themes. A short group reflection concludes the session (1 min elevator pitch format by representative).

Workshops

Biomedical Engineering

More details on the workshop will be announced soon.

Chemical Engineering

Materials Science & Engineering

More details on the workshop will be announced soon.

Project Showcase 

Civil Engineering

Project	Description	Image
Guardians of the Coast	Learn about coastal protection by designing nature-based solutions and slope breakers, then testing your creations in mini wave tanks.
Augmented Reality	Experience VR games designed for the construction field, featuring multiple missions and varying difficulty levels.
Drones: Eyes in the Sky	Damage isn’t always easy to spot, it can occur in tight corners, confined spaces, or high places. That’s where drones come in, acting as our eyes in the sky.

Environmental & Sustainability Engineering

Project	Description	Image
The F1 Challenge	Desalinated water is one of Singapore’s Four National Taps. Desalination plants monitor desalinated water quality by measuring conductivity. Now, you get to use conductivity to create power! Your challenge is to build the fastest CEE Formula One (F1) car by choosing a solution with the optimal conductivity to power it.
Electrochemical Technologies for Industrial Wastewater Treatment	Electrochemical technologies use electricity to create powerful oxidants directly in the water. These oxidants attack and break down toxic, bio recalcitrant pollutants into harmless compounds such as carbon dioxide and water.

Infrastructure & Project Management

Project	Description	Image
Digital twin for cities	Discover Singapore’s full interactive digital twin, as well as a crowdsourced digital twin platform built at NUS by students for the campus community.
Ocean carbon capture with novel sustainable biochar concrete and 3D printing	Discover a groundbreaking “blue-grey” carbon capture approach where biochar-enhanced concrete pulls carbon dioxide from seawater. By combining 3D printing with advanced material mixes, we transform CO₂ into calcium carbonate that strengthens concrete.

Explore Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Industrial & Systems Engineering through programme introductions, student sharing and an interactive project showcase.

Hear from our faculty and students about what you can study and experience across the three programmes. Then, explore the showcase at your own pace, meet project teams and discover how students apply their knowledge to engineering challenges.

Get a closer look at the projects, ask questions about how they work, and chat with our students about their learning experiences at CDE.

More details on the featured projects will be announced soon.

Discover how mechanical systems, control and programming come together through an interactive project showcase and a hands-on autonomous car workshop.

Begin with short programme introductions and student sharing to learn about the study opportunities and student experience across the three programmes. You will then rotate between two activities:

Autonomous Car Workshop

Work in small teams to calibrate sensors and help an autonomous car follow a track. Explore how a car senses its surroundings and responds, and see how adjustments affect its performance.

Interactive Project Showcase

Explore projects from Engineering Science, Mechanical Engineering, and Robotics & Machine Intelligence, including a robotic dog demonstration. Meet the project teams, ask questions and discover how students apply their engineering knowledge to develop working systems.

Both activities offer a chance to connect with our faculty and students while getting a taste of engineering at CDE.

More details on the projects and workshop will be announced soon.