Year of Champions

THE famed American graphic designer Milton Glaser once said: “There are three responses to a piece of design – yes, no, and wow. Wow is the one to aim for.”

And “wow” would certainly be a good word to describe the award-winning Malaysia Design Archive (MDA), a digital platform which aims to trace and document the legacy of Malaysian graphic design.

“The project began with a sense that there is a need to understand the different influences of Malaysia’s design lexicon, and through that, to unpack and interrogate history through the lens of design,” says Ezrena Marwan, MDA co-founder and graphic designer. The MDA’s core team currently comprises Ezrena, activist/writer Jac SM Kee and art history senior lecturer Simon Soon. Founded in 2008, the group started off as an online repository, mainly used by students and graphic design practitioners. Soon, it started engaging in public engagements, including giving workshops and talks, and in April this year, it set up a physical archive space at the Zhongshan building in Kuala Lumpur.

In early December, MDA won the Grand Award for Culture at the Hong Kong-based DFA Design for Asia Awards. The DFA Awards, organised by the Hong Kong Design Centre, aims to raise awareness about the value of good design as an essential component of the improvement of the quality and vibrancy of life in Asia.

“We are both surprised and honoured to have been selected as a winner for this prize. It speaks to us about the support from the community, as well as a recognition of design and visual culture as significant sites for socio-cultural engagement that can have wide, and potentially transformative, impact. This is a great achievement to us,” says Kee.

It may be difficult to believe, but the idea for a Malaysian design archive was actually mooted on another continent: in the city of Havana, Cuba, to be exact. In 2007, Ezrena visited the