ESSAY FILM
WORK PACKAGE 7
©Foundations for Home-Based Work, NUS and Third Street Studio, 2025
In collaboration with filmmakers Third Street Studio, an essay film was produced,capturing the daily lives of four home-based workers. It showcases their paid and unpaid routines, and how these routines interface with the architecture of the home and the wider neighbourhood. Filming of participants commenced in April 2023, with the film premiering in November 2025.
OBJECTIVE 2: ECOLOGIES
Document and theorise local ecologies of resilience and adaptability in home-based work: Spatial, Social, Digital
at home: does the home-worker’s housing and home-based ICT infrastructure adequately support their work? How do workers adjust their home to accommodate their work?
in place: how does home-based work interact with the neighbourhood? Does it contribute positively to the neighbourhood, by adding social or cultural capital (character, services, networks, heritage), or generating shared social and economic responsibilities? How do home-based workers use virtual networks (e.g., platforms)?
At Home with Work
At Home with Work (2025) is an essay film that unravels how social norms, urban legislation, labour, and lived space intersect in contemporary Singapore. Made in collaboration with Third Street Studios (directors, producers) and conceptualised through the “Foundations for Home-Based Work” research initiative led by Associate Professor Lilian Chee (National University of Singapore) (executive producer, concept lead), the film traces what happens when the home—tightly regulated, state-designed, and optimised for family life—becomes a site of paid and unpaid labour.
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In Singapore, public housing policies and urban legislation historically enforce a strict separation between workplaces and domestic environments. Apartments are not planned, dimensioned, or legally imagined as places for paid work. At Home with Work enters this policy-shaped architectural landscape to observe what occurs when this boundary collapses. As workers turn their kitchens, bedrooms, and corridors into improvised workstations—by choice, necessity, or economic precarity—the film reveals how architecture becomes an active participant in the reshaping of daily labour.
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Through close, observational scenes, the film exposes the subtle frictions produced when living and working coincide in compact homes: the rearranged furniture, the interruptions of caregiving, the competing claims on sound, privacy, and space. Guided by an affective-critical lens, it foregrounds the gendered, familial, and emotional labour that underpins these home-based work practices—labour that remains largely invisible in policy discussions yet is central to how work is actually accomplished.
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Rather than celebrating flexibility or entrepreneurial self-reinvention, At Home with Work interrogates the structural conditions that push people to “rehabilitate” their lives away from traditional employment. It asks how legislation, housing design, and economic pressures jointly shape the possibilities and limits of working from home.
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Part critical inquiry, part poetic meditation, the film opens a wider global question: What happens when homes around the world—never designed for contemporary labour demands—must suddenly absorb the full weight of work? In its attention to Singapore’s high-density public housing, At Home with Work offers a lens through which to understand the broader architectural, legal, and social challenges of domestic labour today, revealing how inhabitants continually remake home as both refuge and livelihood.
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Credits:
​Adar Ng & Dave Lim (Directors, Producers, Editors), Lilian Chee (PhD) (Executive Producer, Concept Lead), Woong Soak Teng (Producer), Eugene Seah (Colourist), Nathaniel Mah (Sound Design), Goh Sze Kei & Marcus Loh (Title & Poster Design), Esther Rachel Lai, Marcus Koe & Alexsys Tjhia, Nabill Shukry, Lee Yoke Wen (Cast / Participants), At Home with Work, Singapore: Third Street Studio & NUS, 2025.
