For migrant workers who come all the way to Singapore to earn a better living, the dormitory is more than a place to rest their heads at night. It’s a space for recharging, socialising, and reconnecting with loved ones abroad. However, as they have aged, many dorms have fallen behind the times, underdelivering on what migrant workers need to feel fully at home in Singapore.

Our client, Dormitory Association Singapore Ltd. (DASL), asked us to reimagine accommodations for Singapore’ migrant workers to better serve the requirements not just of the migrant workers themselves, but also dormitory operators and managers and other parties with an interest in the dormitories and in migrant workers’ welfare. 

The core challenge was to redesign the typical dormitory to build a better sense of collective ownership and engagement among dorm residents, managers and operators, not just through infrastructural intervention, but behavioural ones too.

Putting humans back in the centre of the dormitory experience

It was critical to our work to understand the problems and opportunities at a human level – rather than just at the level of aggregated statistics. To achieve this understanding, we began by visiting several dormitories of varying sizes and setups, conducting interviews with residents and other stakeholders, but also closely observing how people were using the space and the culture this was creating.

Our interviews and observations led us to identify six distinct behavioural types of dormitory residents. Each type cut across age groups and countries of origin, and demonstrated different human needs that led to distinct patterns of living within the space and cultures of the dormitories. If we were going to be successful in building worker accommodations that truly created a sense of community and home, it would be important to cater to the needs of all these behavioural types.

"Honestly, I really admire the communal spirit of the workers from places like India and Bangladesh, and how they do everything together.”
‍_{Migrant worker from China, 'Untapped' behavioural type}

"My cousin is here in Singapore but not in this dorm. He's more senior and is teaching me all the things I don't know yet."
_{Migrant worker from India, 'Lost Sheep' behavioural type}

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We also realised that it was critical to design for the needs of dormitory managers, whose behaviours can make or break the success of the dorms. We identified two types of ideal dormitory managers, and articulated the conditions needed to create them and make them successful in building sustainable dormitory experiences that benefit both residents and the workforce.

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"I don't think of them as workers, I think of them as residents."
_{Dormitory manager with 10 years of experience, 'Legionnaire' typology}

“My job...is to take care of 450 different individuals, all coming from a totally different world, so I have to teach them everything from scratch.”
_{Dormitory manager with 7 years experience, 'Tribal Leader' typology}

Architecting a better accommodation experience

In order to meet the needs of all of the different typologies of dormitory resident and manager, we committed to three principles that would act as our north star in the process of designing a better accommodation experience for everyone with a stake in the welfare of Singapore’s migrant workers:

• ‍Design for the human, not just the migrant worker. In order to keep migrant workers healthy and motivated, the dormitory needs to feel like a home, and not just a place to sleep.‍
• Support a growing, evolving life in Singapore. To date, the design of Singapore’s worker dormitories have been focused on the needs of new arrivals. It’s important to plan for how residents’ needs grow and evolve as they become more experienced and embedded both in the dorm, and in Singapore more broadly. ‍
• Support each dormitory’s unique cultural ecosystem. Each dormitory is designed and built differently, and each group of residents will end up creating a different culture. Efforts to build community from the top down won’t work, so each dormitory needs to be given the opportunity to develop a community in its own unique way.

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We conducted a co-creation workshop with 39 participants from across the dormitory ecosystem. Participants included security personnel, dorm managers and owners, who came together to generate ideas for a prototype of a next-generation living space built around our three design principles.

The ideas emerging from the workshop ranged from immediately implementable cosmetic changes to broader-scale changes in building specifications and staff training that need time for development and stakeholder buy-in. We documented all these recommendations in detail, but focused on prototyping and refining near-term cosmetic changes in dormitory rooms in order to ensure that the momentum behind the project was not wasted.

Building the worker dormitory of the future

Over 10 days, working with existing structures and furnishings as much as possible, we re-fitted one dormitory room to reflect the near-term adjustments that we had agreed on at the end of our co-creation workshop. These adjustments were geared towards not just practical considerations like creating more storage and more privacy, but also more difficult challenges like fostering healthy socialising and a greater sense of ownership that leads to better long-term care of the facilities.

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We invited eight residents to move into our showflat for four weeks, and to provide ongoing feedback on their experience. We also visited the showflat regularly to directly observe how the residents were using the space, and how their relationship as a group was evolving as a result of the new space.

​​The feedback from the resident testers was very encouraging and – more importantly – provided clear guidance on how to iterate and scale a greater sense of community, ownership and home across the full ecosystem of Singapore’s migrant worker dorms. 

The residents were highly satisfied with the increased storage and privacy they had, leading to the elimination of make-shift curtains and arrangements that presented fire risks in typical dorm rooms. The space planning and storage solutions that led to resident satisfaction also changed the way they utilised the space, improving overall cleanliness and orderliness, and reducing the need for manager intervention. 

Beyond this, smaller changes to the space – like clocks set to their home timezones – had an outsized impact on the resident testers’ happiness and sense of wellbeing. Every glance at these features sparked a smile, and led to more harmonious and relaxed social interactions. These subtle touches helped foster a sense of security, familiarity and comfort that contributed to our overall objective of creating a dormitory experience with a greater feeling of community, ownership and home.

Moving forward

Our next step is to work out how to best scale the implementation of our recommended design and behavioural principles against business needs and data across various realities that exist in the ecosystem.

Based on this analysis, we will develop a more accurate set of constraints for cost, manpower, materials and sustainability, and use these as guides in scaling up the prototype design across all of Singapore's migrant worker accommodations.