HYPER SPACE
Singapore’s burgeoning design scene, and the creatives drawn to its flame
Celebrating the city-state’s burgeoning creative economy, Designsingapore Council’s Innovation by Design conference, held earlier this year, attracted a diverse line-up of designers, makers, thinkers and business mavericks from all over the world. ‘You only need to look at the skyline to see that Singapore has the capacity to support design in a substantial way, allowing some extraordinary creativity to become reality,’ says designer Beatrix Ong, consultant on the Atlas Bar in Parkview Square. Ong describes Singapore as ‘a unique melting pot of Southeast Asian cultures with a global aesthetic’.
It’s the juxtaposition of tradition and technology, an influx of fearless young talent and ‘a hyper-intersection of culture’, as Ernesto Quinteros, chief design officer of Johnson & Johnson, terms it, that makes contemporary Singapore so vibrant. Adds Mauro Porcini, chief design officer at Pepsico, ‘It’s like entering a parallel dimension, totally projected into the future, conceived and produced by the imagination, the spirit of innovation and the creativity of its people. In the streets of Singapore, nature dances with architecture, creating jazz for your eyes, food for your mind, and inspiration for your soul.’
‘As with the Netherlands, Singapore is built on artificial land,’ says the Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde, founder of social design lab Studio Roosegaarde. ‘Creativity and technology is what made us survive and evolve. The future of Singapore’s design will not be another chair but a hybrid of nature and technology to create our home of tomorrow.’
‘Singapore,’ concludes Quinteros, ‘is uniquely positioned to become the hybrid-vigour epicentre of this century.’