Heritage has a fairly straightforward succession problem. The people who remember something eventually disappear; places change, businesses close, and customs fall out of use. You can document all of it — and you absolutely should — but keeping a record is not quite the same thing as keeping something alive.
If the aim is eventually to pass all this to younger people, there is a case for letting them work out how that handover might happen.
That is effectively what the Temasek Foundation-NUS Libraries Heritage Champions programme has been trying to do. Across two cohorts, 125 students from institutes of higher learning received heritage preservation training before forming teams and proposing community projects. Ten selected teams received up to SGD 7,000 and six months to turn their ideas into something real. And collectively, the projects have reached more than 1,000 people.
While it’s fair to say that the students taking part cannot reasonably represent an entire generation — a 21-year-old in tertiary education may not view heritage the same way as another 21-year-old already working full-time — they don’t need to represent everybody for the exercise to be interesting.
The programme gives young people responsibility for figuring out how their peers might want to encounter and experience stories that began long before them. And that thought alone might be worth exploring.
Technology is one tool among several
It’s fair to say that technology is often the primary catalyst for new initiatives. But this might not be one of them. Some projects rely on digital tools, but rarely on their own.
Shore to Shore, which ran in 2025, explores the communities and history of Singapore’s Southern Islands through an interactive website containing recorded interviews, videos and a 360-degree virtual tour.
The same project also ran intertidal walks, an eco-writing workshop, a St John’s Island heritage tour involving former islanders and workshops where participants learnt about traditional jong racing before building miniature wind-powered boats. Around 280 people took part in its programmes.
The project’s website still carries its virtual tour, docuseries and educational resources.
A Shore to Shore display maps St John’s, Lazarus and Seringat islands as part of the project’s exploration of the Southern Islands and the communities that once lived there. NUS
The Good OL Days uses an interactive map and timeline to trace the Orang Gelam, Orang Kallang, Orang Selat and Orang Seletar, connecting their histories and displacement to familiar places including Kallang, Punggol and Sembawang. It also includes a self-guided Orang Seletar heritage trail.
The project remains publicly accessible online and describes itself as a “living archive”, bringing together stories, maps, literature, film and other material connected to Orang Laut communities whose descendants still live among us.
Ten Years to Grow a Tree takes a similar approach to Traditional Chinese Medicine, pairing a 360-degree virtual medicine hall, map and timeline with decidedly physical qigong and tai chi workshops.
A stamp card can work too
Not everything needs an app: Hainanese Cooked explored the Hainanese contributions now absorbed into wider Singaporean culture, including chicken rice, Nanyang coffee, and the Singapore Sling.
While the team created a website and a children’s book, one of its main activities was considerably less high-tech: a stamp rally across six Hainanese businesses and organisations. The rally ran from 28 June to 31 July 2026, and at least 800 stamp cards were taken up. The project’s website still lets visitors explore the participating businesses and their histories, and read the children’s book online.
Hainanese Cooked used a stamp rally across six Hainanese businesses and organisations to bring visitors directly to the places carrying that heritage. NUS
Wartime Tuckshop took a different tack and sold out four workshops in the process. Visitors learnt how food shortages, rationing, and hyperinflation affected daily life during the Second World War, then used mock ration cards and prepared dishes with ingredients such as tapioca and sweet potato. The recipes, photographs and participants’ reflections were also collated into an online cookbook. Turns out if you want somebody to understand what scarcity did to dinner, sometimes the most direct approach is to try and make it.
Children are another route in
Scoops of Memory focuses on Singapore’s disappearing roadside ice-cream hawkers. Part of what makes the project interesting is how ordinary its subject is: everyday people and routines that many Singaporeans grew up around.
Scoops of Memory documented Singapore’s fading roadside ice-cream hawker trade through interviews, a children’s book, a documentary and a digital archive. NUS
The students interviewed ice-cream hawkers and turned their findings into My Ice Cream Uncle, a children’s book used for storytelling sessions in libraries and preschools. The team also produced a documentary and digital archive recording the trade and the people behind it.
My Ice Cream Uncle gives children a way to learn about roadside ice cream alongside their parents, who likely remember it from their own childhoods—a clever bit of pre-emptive bridge-building for those generation-gap moments. The storytelling sessions reached more than 100 children, parents and teachers.
Other ways into the past
Finding Chinatown turned six heritage businesses and organisations into an interactive trail, with activities including roasting bak kwa and taking part in traditional tea experiences.
MamaMIA documented traditional neighbourhood provision shops from the perspectives of their owners, combining an interactive online resource with a recreated mama shop at Fernvale Community Club where visitors could contribute memories of their own.
Anchored Memories collected first-hand accounts from people who lived and worked around Singapore’s old harbourfront, turning them into a website, activity booklets, a panel discussion and an interactive National Library showcase.
EternaTrees framed trees as living archives, building guided and self-guided trails around culturally significant trees in Sembawang, Toa Payoh-Bishan and Kong Meng San Phor Kark See Monastery. They used GPS-triggered audio guides and augmented reality for walking tours, attaching stories to visitor spots.
From left: Finding Chinatown brought visitors to heritage businesses and organisations; Anchored Memories collected first-hand stories of Singapore’s old harbourfront; EternaTrees built guided and self-guided trails around culturally significant trees. NUS
Preservation needs more than storage
NUS University Librarian Associate Professor Natalie Pang explains that heritage extends beyond monuments and historic buildings to everyday experiences, memories, food, places and communities, and that the youth have an important role to play: “When young people take ownership of these stories and find new ways to share them, they help ensure that our heritage remains relevant and meaningful to future generations.”
And the solution doesn’t have to be an app just because you can build one easily. As the showcase demonstrates, most of its elements are familiar: interactive maps, 360-degree tours, websites and augmented reality aren’t new; stamp cards, children’s books, cooking classes and guided walks are older still. A sophisticated chatbot is not inherently better than a stamp card; ultimately, what matters is whether it makes connection easier — or more appealing.