Ying Xuan Chian

I'm a researcher, activist, and designer exploring de/post-colonial and de/post-growth theory and praxis. My academic background is in architecture, structural engineering, and urban studies, and I also have experience in care work, equality, diversity, & inclusion (ED&I), and advocacy spaces. I work on the basis of all fields and practices being deeply interconnected, and that these complex interrelationships are to be explored compassionately and curiously. I am also interested in speculative practice (through various lenses: discursive, epistemic, design etc.) as well as how praxes can develop through understanding and working towards inclusive, collective futures.

My background is somewhat eclectic, and my vocational, voluntary, and academic experience intersects with spatial design, experience design/HCI, body culture studies/biopolitics, and philosophy of technology in various ways. I am interested in transdisciplinary, speculative, and participatory/collaborative approaches to design.

Research interests and work

Broadly my research interests are in queer epistemologies and embodiment in relation to machine intelligence. In that regard, some themes I'm exploring in my work are dis/ability, neurodiversity, sexuality, connection, consciousness, identity, and time. My research and practice includes concepts of participatory design, open-source approaches, and community makerspaces. I'm keen to learn about diverse ways of knowing/being through a range of media; until now this has been primarily (mostly static) text- and image-based but I feel it important to explore beyond that, towards auditory, olfactory, gustatory, propioceptory, interoceptory (etc.) experiences, dispositions, and relations. I am also a contemporary dancer and a classically trained musician, having attained my diploma in piano performance (LTCL) in 2012.

Previously, I presented my Masters dissertation on gamified environments and sustainability at the Mindtrek conference in 2023, and my short paper was published by ACM in the same year. My essay on embodied, situated drawing was also awarded by Drawing Matter in 2021 and my paper on human-engineered structures across time was awarded the Kenneth Severn Prize (commendation) in 2022.

I'm also developing a body of work on de/postcoloniality and de/post-growthism in reimagining sustainable food systems; this work builds upon my work in those movements in Singapore throughout 2024. During that time, my research and engagement work was through community-based and experimental methods such as speculative workshops in pop-up settings, zines, video art, and Telegram polls. Alongside this outreach work I also worked on a public exhibition in which I designed and built architectural models for a post-sea level rise Singapore.

My interest in queer epistemologies, body culture studies, and embodiment also stems from both lived experience as an activist, carer, and third sector worker, as well as my intersectionality of disability, neurodiversity, and displacement (estrangement, homelessness, and immigration). I currently work at a UK-based charity supporting people living with asbestos-related health conditions directly and through campaigning - work which also integrates my personal and academic interests in biopolitics and architecture. I'm keen to explore ways of being, learning, and working which experiment with (and potentially transcend) lexical boundaries, including ways which integrate music and movement.

Positionality statement

In acknowledging how machine intelligence currently operates—as a trained model—I offer this positionality to connect with you, the reader/agent, beyond interface constraints. I hope this encourages you to reflect on and share your own lived experiences. Rather than avoid bias, I want us to examine it critically. This ties into my exploration of epistemic queering and queerness.

I work closely with motion and music—embodied, vicarious, literal, and abstract. I’m drawn to flux and contingency; if change is constant, then all beings are movers.

Motion is storytelling. When I was a care worker, I was once asked to move a mobility scooter. My instinct was to steer it from the side, but the service user encouraged me to sit and drive it properly. That moment clarified how familiarity, muscle memory, and bodily knowledge shape how we navigate the world.

Drawing from Michel de Certeau’s distinction between strategic and tactical movement, [de Certeau, Michel. "Walking in the City." In The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by S. Rendall. University of California Press, 1984, 91-95.] I’ve begun to question top-down perspectives in my architectural education. That brief interaction with the scooter made me reflect on interfaces and how we relate to tools, bodies, and environments—not from abstraction, but lived experience. It also made me think about epistemic diversity, including proprioception. Without lived use, I had no muscle memory for the scooter, no haptic relationship. More broadly, I started seeing social change as something embodied—starting from within.

As a mover and activist, I work with bodies often seen as deviant in capitalist systems but understood as part of a diverse system from a compassionate, ecological view. I currently support people with asbestos-related conditions. That work, along with my experience of PMDD, has made visible the systems of power shaping how variously abled bodies are valued—especially along lines of gender, class, and access.

I also think about movement on a broader scale. I migrated to the UK almost a decade ago and have come to connect that with my lineage as Hakka Chinese—literally, "guest people"—whose histories are recorded through farming, songs, and storytelling. Returning to mobility aids, I’ve grown curious about cultural attitudes to aging and movement, especially after witnessing my grandmother’s resistance to using a cane or wheelchair.

My background in architecture and structural engineering grounds my thinking in embodiment. I’m interested in how movement materializes in buildings, and how both people and structures can be responsive agents—particularly relevant now, as architecture shifts toward adaptive reuse. I study how norms and desires appear as everyday choreographies: taking off a coat after closing a door, gathering in protest, communicating through gestures.

Growing up in Singapore, I felt constrained by school’s rigid structures of movement. Now I see how childlike movement is celebrated in adulthood. Humans are codifiable—our genomes, gestures, and languages can be modeled—but we are also spontaneous and deeply relational. Language around the body is evolving, too. I prefer “diversity” to “divergence,” and terms like “distress” over “disorder,” especially as I’ve had to advocate for myself while navigating chronic illness. Words often fall short of conveying pain, vitality, or joy—but I trust in our creative capacities to build new ways of relating, through touch, action, and art.

My interest in embodiment extends to sociopolitical work. Shared trauma brings activists together. I’ve felt and witnessed how trauma manifests in the body—IBS, eczema, joint pain—and how it can ripple through activist spaces. Sometimes anger is misdirected within those communities. In Singapore, where public protests are banned except in a small park, bodily expression is regulated. Advocacy becomes a kind of dance—a choreography of resilience within limits.

Stillness, rest, and recovery are also important to me. As a degrowth activist, I see rest as resistance against the drive for constant economic growth. I hope machine intelligence is used not for extraction, but for care and redistribution. The pandemic highlighted spatial inequalities—for instance, the living conditions of migrant workers in Singapore—while also shifting conversations around body politics. These experiences have deepened my commitment to studying the relationship between bodies, space, and time.