Singapore is a sprightly 60 years young this year. Given its youth, reputation for innovation and highest per capita GDP in the world, Singapore Design Week 2025 could have been a triumphant showcase of the sleek, futuristic and posthuman. The future is definitely on the minds of its designers — but through the lens of pragmatic problem-solving.
Japan and Singapore are wrestling with some common issues: aging populations, resource-poor island geographies, compressed urban living, highly competitive educational systems causing mental health problems, declining pools of service industry workers and manual laborers, and an East-West identity hang-up.
“Nation by Design,” the theme of Singapore Design Week 2025 that runs through Sept. 21, doesn’t patronize by telling us the future is bright but reassures us that people are working on it.
The Future Impact section of the festival was set up in the National Museum of Singapore and featured a digest of archival and contemporary Singaporean design. With a handbook and sample pieces, “Refuse” by Wong Eng Geng proposes dumpster diving for raw materials that can be repurposed for DIY furniture projects. “Celia” by Kalinda Chen uses oyster mushroom mycelium formed into a double-ended funnel as a passive air purifier. Olivia Lee’s “Matahari” is a solar cooker that elevates survival equipment into a design object incorporating clay pot cuisine common in the Malay Peninsula.
Located in the city’s National Design Centre, the “Unnatural History Museum of Singapore” offers quirkiness in the face of existential crisis as a postmodern menagerie spoofing the natural science museum experience. Exhibits include a 6-meter-tall mock skeleton of a merlion (Singapore’s mythical half-lion, half-fish mascot), cyborg cockroaches developed at Nanyang Technological University for search and rescue through collapsed buildings, a robotic river-cleaning swan and a “high-rise” cemetery that anticipates the future lack of space for underground burial.
The more earnest but still playful Design for Care section in the Marina Central District addresses social isolation in different stages of life. Craft workshops including tsumamizaiku — the Japanese craft of forming decorative motifs from fabric squares — and musical performances addressed loneliness in the big city. Spaces designed as temporary oases from productivity mandates include a sound-designed “Gratitude Grove” and a “Well-Being Bar,” in which visitors are served not alcohol but personalized notes of affirmation.
In the Reinvention forum, the most technology-oriented section of the festival, are AI delivery platforms that can go in and out of buildings and ride elevators, smart robot floor-scrubbers and mechanical massagers, optimistically proposed as assistants to (rather than replacements of) service industry workers. At the other end of the tech scale are urban-trekking poles with grips designed in such a way as to ensure seniors exercise core muscles while walking, as well as pants with magnetic fasteners that do not require you to bend over to put them on — both part of a presentation titled “Aging in Place.”
For straight-up pretty things, the Emerge section of the design fair — organized by Edwin Low, mingei (Japanese folk craft) fan and founder of lifestyle brand Supermama — is the place to go. Highlights include Sophia Chin’s delicately speckled porcelain dining collection, John Tay’s elaborate 3D-printed forms attached to broken objects titled “Kintsugi 2.0,” which play on the traditional Japanese craft of decorative pottery repair, May Masutani’s hanging glass links based on kusari-doi (decorative chain downspouts) and Pan Projects’ sculptural rope made of denim scraps.
The design week’s theme of a “Nation by Design,” a concept first promoted in 2018 by then-Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, is critically examined in a subsection of the Reinvention forum, “Nation By Design: Reimagining Singaporean Identity,” organized by RMIT University and the Singapore Institute of Management. In contrast to Japan, where there is a tendency toward a monolithic view of culture, Singapore's culturally diverse population and relative newness as a country, means there's limited mileage in appealing to tradition. RMIT lecturer Regine Abos suggests that Singaporean design “is not defined by a single (national) identity but by many. It is pluriversal, shaped by diverse lived experiences and continually reimagined through the creative practices of its people.”
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