Aveline Ang Swee Leng
What We Hold Between Us
Mappig Motherhood: The Mama ArchiveHello, I’m Aveline, also known as Tomato! I am a transdisciplinary social designer with a background in visual merchandising, graphic design, and playground design. My practice focuses on designing with communities through participatory and ethnographic methods, engaging communities with their lived experiences and everyday practices.
I am curious about how design can surface what is often overlooked and act as a medium for connection, reflection, and collective wellbeing. In my recent work, I explore how care and gratitude are expressed in community life. Using photovoice, qualitative research, and narrative analysis, I work with communities to document, interpret, and reflect on everyday experiences.
Through this, I approach design as a practice of listening, co-creation, and sensemaking, drawing from participatory design, facilitation, and thematic synthesis to hold space for multiple perspectives.
As “fresh produce,” I hope to continue growing my worldview and collaborating with others committed to community-centred and environmentally conscious practices.
What We Hold Between Us
These everyday interactions are understood in this project as relational acts. They include gestures such as greeting, sharing, helping, or simply paying attention to one another. While they may appear ordinary, they play an important role in sustaining social relationships. Over time, these acts build trust and reciprocity within a community. Gradually, I observed that these acts do more than express care. They also carry and circulate gratitude. When care is recognised, it is often responded to, and through this reciprocity, gratitude moves between people. In this way, gratitude is not only a feeling, but something practised through action and embedded within everyday life.
To explore this, I worked with community members through photovoice, a participatory approach that invites participants to document moments from their own lived experiences. Rather than defining what care or community should look like, the project centres what participants themselves notice in routines, relationships, and ordinary encounters. These photographs, paired with their narratives, reveal how meaning is formed through lived experience rather than imposed interpretation.
To support a way of engaging with these stories, the project draws on the GRAT-16 framework (Watkins et al., 2003) as a lens for noticing. Instead of treating gratitude as something to be measured, it is used here to sensitise attention to different ways appreciation may already exist within daily life. Through this lens, moments may be understood as noticing simplicity, recognising others, or finding contentment. These are not fixed categories, but ways of tracing how gratitude appears across different situations and relationships.
Through this process, the project suggests that what sustains communities may lie in these repeated relational acts where care is expressed, gratitude is recognised, and both continue through ongoing interaction. These ordinary moments, often overlooked, contribute to a shared sense of belonging and continuity within community life.
Across these stories, gratitude does not appear as a fixed or singular state. It shifts across moments and relationships, taking different forms depending on how people notice and respond to one another. What emerges is not a single definition, but a pattern of how people attend to, respond to, and hold one another in community.
What We Hold Between Us refers to these relational moments that are carried between people over time. If these acts were no longer present, what would remain of a community?