Liminal Living：International Student Dormitory
Liminal Rooms is a publication-based design project exploring how temporary student accommodation can gradually become a space of belonging. Focusing on the lived experiences of international students, the project considers the room not simply as a place to stay, but as a transitional space shaped by personal objects, memories, boundaries and everyday acts of inhabiting.
Structured through the stages of Arrival, Threshold, Making Home and Belonging, the publication traces a gradual movement from unfamiliarity and transience towards attachment and recognition. Research was developed through questionnaires, interviews and photographic documentation of student rooms, alongside material and image-making experiments including Polaroid photography, emulsion lifts, hand-drawn translations and layered transparent paper.
Rather than treating belonging as a fixed condition, the project understands it as something slowly constructed through repetition, personalisation and emotional attachment. Through changes in colour, image treatment, typography and materiality, the publication transforms this process into a tactile reading experience, asking how graphic design can make visible the subtle transition between temporarily occupying a room and beginning to call it home.
Polaroid emulsion lift experiments transform photographic documentation into fragile, material traces of lived experience.
A detailed view of the publication’s binding, paper choices and layered construction.
The front cover introduces the project through an experimental image of a temporary interior.
A translucent spread questioning the relationship between photographic documentation and personal memory.
The opening page introducing the publication and its exploration of international student accommodation.
A close view of the publication being experienced through touch, transparency and layered pages.
The publication opened to reveal its layered structure, materiality and sculptural form.
A spread bringing together personal testimony and visual fragments of everyday domestic experience.
A spread exploring how everyday objects and repeated actions gradually create a sense of home.
A physical view of the completed publication, showing its cover, back cover and binding as one integrated object.
Translucent pages create shifting relationships between text, image, memory and physical space.
The back cover presents the lived-in student room as an accumulation of objects, memories and traces.