Regional Panels
Designing toward a creative city: Positioning the citizen in Singapore’s rebranding
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11:00PM
This panel will examine the intentions and practices underlying the Design 2025 call to engage the Singapore public in the country's national design identity. While the government recognises that this will require an opening up of social and political spaces more conducive to experimentation and innovation; complete freedom of public expression on political, ethnic, and religious issues remains relatively controlled. Some have suggested that this reflects the image of an “emerging creative city”, where a flourishing - if not slightly corralled - creative economy is encouraging a “gradual democratisation” of society. With indications that the national design policy is up for review this year, and considering recently revived conversations around citizen voice, the panel will discuss what the future image of Singapore as a creative city might be, what that might mean for the public, and what the role of service design might be to achieving it. The panellists consists of Dr Jung Joo Lee (Assistant Professor, NUS, Service Design Lab), Dr Carol Soon (LKY School of Public Policy), Debbie Ng of ThinkPlace, Justin Zhang (Plain Words) and Vicky Gerard (Loughborough University London) who is a researcher of public engagement.
Debbie has over 10 years of experience helping both public and private sector organisations leverage design for strategic differentiation, innovation and business transformation. She is talented at developing the design capabilities of non-designers, ethnographic research methods, and developing stories and visualisations to support change. She has developed executive education programs, training curricula and design toolkits for many private and public sector clients. Through her practice, she has helped organisations adopt the design process to solve complex issues they are facing in delivering public value. Debbie is a certified Business Design Trainer and Facilitator through the Rotman School of Management and an Associate Trainer with the Civil Service College in Singapore. She also holds multiple certificates in service design and design innovation. She spoke at the 19th Design Management Institute: Academic Design Management Conference in London in 2014 on ‘Citizen-Centric Public Policies and Services Through Design’ and was subsequently published in ‘Design Management in an Era of Disruption’. Debbie also holds a Bachelor of Social Science Second Class Honours (Upper) in Economics and Bachelor of Science with Merit Field of Study Economics Grade Second Upper from the National University of Singapore.
Chief Design Officers in public organisations: What design leadership do we need in Singapore’s public organisations?
JJ is currently a Deputy Head (Research) and Assistant Professor at the Division of Industrial Design, National University of Singapore. Her teaching & research areas include Service Design, Human-Centered Design, Co-Design and User Experience Design. Her current research interests focus on 1) public sector transformation through Service Design, 2) Service Design for aging, and 3) the adoption of Service Design in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. JJ holds her Ph.D from Aalto University in Finland and has worked on various service design and interaction design projects in collaboration with global companies like Microsoft, Samsung, Rolls-Royce (Marine), and government agencies including the Ministry of Manpower, the Ministry of Education, GovTech in Singapore.
Dr Carol Soon is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies where she heads the Society and Culture Department. She has a PhD in Communications and New Media from the National University of Singapore. Her research interests are in false information, digital literacy and inclusion, media regulation, new media and activism, and public engagement and deliberation. She has published her research in books and peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Asian Journal of Communication and Public Integrity. She worked with the Ministry of Health in 2017 on Singapore’s first Citizens’ Jury and is currently working with various government agencies on engaging citizens in co-creating policy solutions. Carol is also Associate Director of the Asia Journalism Fellowship which is supported by Temasek Foundation. She is the Vice Chair of Singapore’s Media Literacy Council and a member of the Industry Advisory Panel for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. She sits on the Civil Service College-Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth Partnerships and Engagement Experts Panel. Carol has taught courses at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and the University Scholars Programme at NUS. In 2015, Carol received the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy Research Excellence Award. She was also a recipient of the Australian Endeavour Award in 2012. Prior to joining academia, she worked in the corporate sector where she developed communication campaigns for profit and non-profit organisations. Carol is currently a volunteer mentor with Advisory SG and Voices of Asia.
I have ten years experience working internationally with government, civil society, industry and academia to enhance public engagement practices across sectors, from healthcare to ageing to education. My practice is passionately participatory in nature, with the twin goal of strengthening the public engagement strategies of institutions, while enhancing their long term public engagement capabilities, which I do in three ways, through:
1. Research to review the status of design and innovation eco-systems and generate insights to inform the design of appropriate intervention strategies to improve public engagement.
2. Training to build inclusive design and innovation capability within organisations and communities. Such programmes are developed from preliminary insights research.
3. Experimental interventions which support inclusive research and generate dialogue to promote greater inclusion in design and innovation.
Justin Zhuang is a writer and researcher who sees the world through design. He has written extensively about design and urban life in Singapore and authored books such as INDEPENDENCE: The history of graphic design in Singapore since the 1960s (2012) and By Design: SINGAPORE (2019).
