Design Anthology - Asia Pacific Edition
Nation Making
We consider Singapore’s designled approach and what it may offer the rest of the world
A lthoughlthough Singapore is one of Asia’s smallest countries, it’s difficult to neatly sum up what ‘Singaporean design’ looks and feels like. This is a compliment from a critical perspective, but a conundrum from a promotional one.
Could this be because Singapore’s material culture is influenced by so many different references? With its history as a trading settlement dating back to the late 13th century, Singapore is the last remaining example of a very particular urban typology, says Kennie Ting, director of the Asian Civilisations Museum, who recently opened the ACM’s new Materials and Design galleries. As Ting explains, the ‘cosmopolitan Asian port city’ once included ‘sister cities’ Guangzhou, Nagasaki, Mumbai, Jakarta, Yangon, Melaka and Ho Chi Minh City, among many others, that, unlike Singapore ‘have all “returned” to their hinterlands with the advent of the nation state since World War Two’, becoming ‘rather more nationalistic and inward-oriented’.
Ting says that given Singapore’s form as a cosmopolitan Asian port city, its material culture ‘doesn’t sit easily within civilisational silos like Chinese culture, Indian culture, Malayo-Javanese culture and so on. It’s an
amalgamation of all of these, with British, Portuguese and Dutch cultures thrown in the mix’ via the latter groups’ colonial presences in the region. Ting credits this hybrid nature with contemporary Singapore’s ability to ‘find resonance with a full range of cultures… we naturally know how to engage with our colleagues from China, India, ASEAN, the USA and Europe because there are elements within each of these that also form part of Singapore’s cultural DNA.’
When asked what makes Singaporean design distinctive in an Asian context, Mark Wee, executive director of DesignSingapore Council (Dsg; a sometime client of this writer) shares a similar view. ‘Because of Singapore’s multicultural make-up, our designers are more comfortable blending references than those who come from countries with more uniform heritages,’ he says.
Singapore’s contemporary condition as a highly developed island nation may increase this openness to far-flung influences. On a practical level, its designers lack immediate access to both local heritage handicraft practitioners and a broad manufacturing base, compared to many neighbouring countries. And through investment in aviation and shipping infrastructure, Singapore’s economic development policies up until now have continued to emphasise its role as a place of exchange. The Port of Singapore is the world’s secondbusiest, while Changi Airport, another major hub, regularly attracts ‘best airport’ plaudits for its exceptional service design and luxurious interiors.
Perhaps this is why it’s challenging to describe what Singaporean design looks and feels like: because the nation’s relative strengths in the global design arena don’t lie in the types of design typically featured in the pages of magazines such as this one. This is certainly not to say that Singapore lacks talent in the fields of architecture, interiors, product design, graphic design and so on; the projects and practices profiled elsewhere in this issue are clear evidence to the contrary.
Yet Singapore also presents world-class examples of design on a much larger, systemic scale, and in some cases in newer disciplines like service and user experience or interaction design.The strategically located, cosmopolitan island nation is notable also for the swiftness of its modernisation and wealth creation, its political continuity and, critically, its density: Singapore’s 5.7 million inhabitants live on 724 square kilometres of land, an area increased by nearly 25 per cent since the nation’s 1965 independence through cumulative land reclamation along its coastline. ‘Our geographic compactness forces systematic planning. Because of these constraints, everything has to be considered,’ Wee explains.
As Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong put it in an oftquoted 2018 speech, ‘design is... a core element of our nation-building. Singapore is a nation by design. Nothing we have today is natural or happened by itself. Somebody thought about it, made it happen... Nothing was by chance.’
This comprehensive, long-term approach manifests itself in systems-level, city-scale design, particularly through the work of those government agencies that nest under the Ministry of National Development and the Ministry of Environment and Water Resources. Since they were introduced in 1971, the MND’s national Concept Plans have been a key tool for Singapore’s long-term land use and transport planning. Covering a period of 40 to 50 years, the Concept Plan takes into account population projections and economic aspirations, while seeking to create ‘a high-quality living environment for all Singaporeans’. To ensure flexibility to changing needs, each is supported by ten-year reviews and medium-term statutory Master Plans, reviewed every five years.
Some of the achievements enabled by this long-term integrated approach include the robustly designed, income-diverse Housing Development Board towns and estates that accommodate over 75 per cent of households and enable a 90 per cent national home ownership rate, an extensive island-wide network of green spaces that place Singapore in a starring role in the growing global movement for biophilic urbanism, and an internationally renowned water conservation and management system.
‘Singapore has historically designed policies and services around citizen behaviours to effect long-term desired outcomes, from pension fund contributions to racial integration in public housing to road pricing. While these examples weren’t labelled as “design” then, they make up a backdrop for Singapore’s continuing citizencentric approach,’ observe Vidhya Ganesan, Yishan Lam and Diaan-Yi Lin in a 2019 report for McKinsey.
In addition to its various design industry development initiatives, Dsg aims to persuade more entities and consumers to value and use design services. ‘Dsg is looking to drive the adoption of design as a strategic enabler across business and government,’ Wee explains. Singapore has ‘a well-travelled population with spending power, but I’d say consumer sophistication varies,’ he continues. ‘There has been a preference for overseas products as a validation of taste, but I think
this is changing with a new, younger generation that wants to support lifestyle consumer goods from local, independent players. This needs to be backed by quality and value for money.’
Perhaps offering the most intriguing potential for society-wide impact is the ambition to inculcate a general design mindset among Singaporeans. According to Wee, Dsg ‘is interested in skills development — not just for design professionals and for design educators — and how to build a design sensibility into the workforce more broadly, developing everyone’s innovation muscles.’
As befits Singapore’s hybrid origins and relatively young history as an independent nation, its policymakers have often sought out best practices from the rest of the world, seeking to learn from and improve on them. But having designed its own dramatic transformation ‘from Third World to First in one generation’, the country is now in a position to export methods and technologies. We see this in action in the newly formed Global Centre for Technology, Innovation and Sustainable Development, a joint initiative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the national government, or the consulting work that various Singaporean firms are undertaking in large-scale urban developments in China and elsewhere.
This raises the exciting prospect of what broader opportunities an understanding of ‘Singaporean design’ might offer, in complement to the aesthetic delights of the places and objects showcased elsewhere in this issue. How might a Singaporean approach to design help the world rise to the urgent global challenges of our time, including a destabilised climate, social inequality and the depletion of our living planet’s resources?
The country that innovated the hawker centre, bringing seemingly untameable street food culture into an organised and hygienic point of local bonding and international renown, would seem well-placed to design and implement systems that eliminate the global plagues of single-use plastic pollution, food waste and food air miles. All the better if it pairs the ingenuity of its industrial designers with that of its systems designers. And how could Singapore’s economy, which has emphasised value creation through ingenuity rather than local natural resources, show the world how to surpass or dramatically reinvent that dead-tired American export, mall culture? Leveraging Singapore’s service design and IoT expertise to focus on experiences more than goods, and to support consumers to make truly informed choices based on more than an item’s price tag — questions like ‘Who made this?’, ‘Under what circumstances?’ and ‘With what impacts?’ — would be a blazing start.
A reinvigoration of Singapore’s cosmopolitan port city DNA offers even more tantalising possibilities for worldchanging design interventions. With a 159 per cent mobile phone penetration rate, how might Singapore expand its Smart Nation initiative to position itself as a leading low-carbon hub for knowledge creation and exchange; to share with the world the next generation of humane and intuitive remote communications tools? What is the Singapore Airlines or Changi Airport equivalent of luxurious, user-centric, virtual and lowcarbon communication?
Moreover, a country that values multiculturalism to the point that it mandates a balance of ethnicities within its public housing estates would seem well placed to pursue new, hybrid visual cultures that open their arms to an even wider plurality of cultures, lifestyles and stories. Design that thrives on inclusive, sensitive cultural blending could be a progressive breakwater against the murky waves of nationalism and intolerance rising in other parts of the world.
To succeed, these thrilling possibilities would require a healthy critical mindset. Any nation seeking to imbue a design sensibility at a national scale might sensibly consult Pentagram partner Natasha Jen’s epic takedown of the ubiquitous buzzword ‘design thinking’, in which she highlights the key role that critique plays in any robust design process.
These possibilities also assume support for the cultural aspects of design as an essential complement to the field’s role of economic driver, which Singapore currently appears to privilege. Initiatives like the Asian Civilisations Museum’s new collaboration with the Textile and Fashion Federation, which enables talented young designers to draw new inspiration from the museum’s archive, light a way forward in this regard. Ting notes ‘a tendency to draw on our recent history as an independent nation to define so-called “Singaporean culture”.’ Rather, he says, ‘We need to dig deeper and reach further afield…. All aspects of our heritage — even those we take for granted as quintessentially Singaporean — have global roots. So, what’s to say we can’t continually explore and redefine Singaporean culture in the future?’
So, here’s how I’d hope to sum up ‘Singaporean design’ ten years from now: luxuriously regenerative, confidently critical and rooted in innovation.