Helena Robless

About

Helena is an architectural designer based in London and Singapore, with a keen focus on how digital design and innovative material technologies can start to tackle sociopolitical and environmental issues. At the Royal College of Art, her projects and research have investigated how biomaterial development, game design, and digital sensory media can convey Asian narratives and experiences within unique spatial environments. 

Agar Agar

Agar Agar is a gelatinous dessert derived from seaweed, that has been popular across Asia for centuries.

“Agar Agar” is also a colloquial term in Singapore, where I’m from. It means to approximate, to make an attempt.

The bionic agar bioplastic interface presents an interactive hybrid digital-sensory space that both obscures and opens up through variations in translucencies and lighting of the green-blue shimmering panels. A riverside garden for collective, spatial therapy, in a hyper-technological society that stigmatises open conversations and treatment for mental health.

The project evokes a form of spatial therapy by combining the soothing haptics of agar with an interactive digital augmentation of light and darkness, as well as the meditative spatial sequences inspired by the scholar’s gardens. The interface is a bionic language of lightness, playing with visual clarity and blurred boundaries between spaces. The many draped roof canopies, suspended panels, and curved screens operate as one entity. This entity dims and glows as it responds to several feedback channels running from each individual interaction with the building. By embedding the sensorial and user-focused aspects of the digital space with the textures of familiar bio-materials, the presence of people makes the building come alive.

Prior to her postgraduate studies at the RCA, she completed her BA in Architecture at the University of Cambridge in 2021 and worked on multiple commercial mixed-use projects in Singapore with architects61.