November 2025Coded Life

Coded Life was an 11 week long design studio centered around exploring alternative uses cases for barcodes and QR codes. Building on top of the lab’s own work in this area (see BARC and SCAN TO PLAY), students considered our current relationship with this everyday infrastructure, and developed new use cases that creatively and critically challenge their status quo.

Platform facilitators
Clement Zheng
Yong Zhen Zhou
See the CDE News writeup!

Class Projects

Co|Decode
A collaborative tabletop escape room.
Jan Abigail Ampo Juarez & Stephanie Beh

Bridging Senses
Making QR code payments accessible for the blind and low vision community.
Carina Yak & Jamie Koh

DECODE
An interactive exhibition about the QR code.
Tan Ler Shan & Danikh Aqib Bin Mohd Nizam

Finding Dan the Duck
Public scam awareness campaign.
Alastair Tan & Stefan Lim

Rewind
Interactive QR code photo wall.
Clarice Chew, Ruth Yong, Sharon Quek

Where’s QRdo
A QR code scavenger hunt.
Chen Zi Xin & Jernyse Ong

Node
QR code + sticky note for information association.
Teo Myron & Mohd Khairul Bin Ramli

Exploring barcodes and QR codes