Singaporean Designers Offer Visions of the Future

This year has proved to be a pivotal moment in history when we are afforded the opportunity to rethink both the present and future. In Visions of the Future, eight Singaporean designers have the opportunity to showcase their ideas

Visions of the Future at Singapore’s National Design Centre

An initiative of Singapore's national agency for design, DesignSingapore Council, Visions of the Future is in every way a response to the current pandemic reality. For one, it’s presented smartly for a socially distanced audience — accessible both online and onsite. Its real-life iteration at Singapore’s National Design Centre takes the form of wave-like displays, their peaks and valleys elegantly spacing out each exhibit.

Exhibition designers and curators Wendy Chua and Gustavo Maggio (of multidisciplinary design practice Forest & Whale) were inspired by the peak-and-trough patterns of COVID-19 infection cycles and refer to the idea of ‘riding out the waves of a pandemic’. Implicitly perhaps, the exhibition also signifies a new wave that’s coming into design thinking at a time of converging crises.

‘We made the decision not to create a brief that designers would respond to. Instead, we wanted to curate a collection of future narratives seen through the eyes of young designers,’ Chua explains. The seven proposals from eight designers were selected through an open call in 2019, and were originally intended to be presented at Milan Design Week in 2020. Though plans for Milan were thrown out when the design event was cancelled due to the pandemic, Chua says all of the proposals, which deal with issues like climate change and mental well-being, only gained more relevance and meaning through the subsequent events of the year.

Design is inherently a forward-looking discipline, and here the curators want to highlight the relevance of timing and trajectory. ‘At the beginning of the pandemic, everybody was jumping in to see how we as designers can contribute our skills. There was this amazing spirit of innovation with altruistic goals, and we saw things like 3D-printed masks and strap extenders and PPE for healthcare workers. Those were really quick solutions to resolve immediate issues,’ Chua says. ‘Now that cities are entering second and third waves, we have to start grappling with issues that have further reaching consequences, that aren’t so easy to resolve,’ she continues, citing issues such as the effects of quarantine and isolation, and the increased widespread use of plastics.

Visions of the Future is one of several initiatives by DesignSingapore Council intended to nurture the next generation of design entrepreneurs. The agency’s executive director Mark Wee says, ‘In addition to showing the importance of design in dealing with real-world challenges, we hope to develop the capabilities of these emerging designers so that they can create impactful works for the future, thus elevating and improving our daily lives and contributing to a loveable Singapore. Through this exhibition, we also hope to profile their work to a local and international design industry and media audience.’

To that end, the onsite and virtual exhibitions are accompanied by a programme of events including live and video panel discussions and podcasts. These are important platforms for the young designers, who are all under the age of 30. ‘People say the pandemic is creating a generation of lost youths, because of the disruption and disturbance to their lives,’ Chua says. ‘We beg to differ. We think young people are becoming very vocal about their ideas and about their visions for our collective future. We should listen to what they have to say.’

But the eight designers featured in the exhibition have an impressive (albeit young) design lineage — and government support — to draw on. Summing up Singaporean design culture, from which these designers come and which they are in turn shaping, Wee says, ‘Going beyond the aesthetics, Singaporean design embodies an attitude and desire to always seek to make lives better through design. This is why design has been intrinsic to the story of Singapore, where nothing was left to chance and our pioneers leveraged design and creative thinking to turn constraints into infinite possibilities.’

Text / Yvonne Xu
Images / Courtesy of DesignSingapore Council