Faculty of Design

Graphic Design

Amani Mohamed

Malay Memory Manual

This thesis book explores the Sri Lankan Malay diaspora through the lens of memory, food, language, and cultural preservation. It looks at how identity is carried through everyday practices such as cooking, storytelling, family photographs, textiles, recipes, and fragments of language. Rather than presenting the archive as something fixed or purely historical, the book frames it as something living, held within people, rituals, materials, and the small inherited gestures that continue across generations.Through visual research, interviews, recipe documentation, maps, archival imagery, and design experimentation, the book reflects on how cultural knowledge survives migration, adaptation, and loss. It becomes both a record and a space of remembrance, honouring the Sri Lankan Malay community while asking how design can preserve what is often intangible, personal, and at risk of being forgotten.

“This thesis is a living archive of Sri Lankan Malay memory, identity, and cultural practice. It uses design as a method of preservation, gathering recipes, oral histories, language, photographs, textures, and inherited rituals to explore how culture continues to survive through everyday acts. At its core, this project is about remembering what migration, assimilation, and time can fragment. It honours the ways diasporic communities carry history not only through written records, but through food, speech, storytelling, domestic spaces, and shared gatherings. By treating these practices as forms of archive, the book creates space for cultural knowledge that is personal, communal, and constantly evolving.”