1. A very good morning to all of you.
2. Congratulations to DesignSingapore Council first and foremost for organising the Design Education Summit. I thank all of you for championing design thinking in our schools, and perhaps the wider Singapore. I will share with you why I think this is something very important, something that I hope to see permeate every aspect of our life in Singapore, and more importantly, our thinking.
3. This is the third edition. Not a very long history, but it has achieved a lot. I hope that this will continue to grow, so that this culture of design thinking is with us all, starting from young. I was actually introduced to this term about 20 over years ago when I was doing my masters in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). What is design thinking? Why design thinking? I learnt that it is actually not just about designing something to meet a functional need.
4. So today, I want to start off by clarifying two misconceptions that perhaps people have about design and design thinking. One is that this is just to meet functional needs. You have a problem, we solve the problem. That is design 101, but it goes beyond that. A really good design does not just meet basic functional needs.
5. I believe Winston Churchill once said - we spend maybe two to three years designing a building and then the building will design us for the next 20 to 30 years. If you paraphrase that, it is not just about buildings. If you design something, you may take one to two weeks, one to two months. But if you design it well, you will in turn "design us" for the next 20 to 30 years. You will engage us, you will connect us, you will inspire us.
6. The second misconception that I think we have is that design is for artsy people, who create beautiful products. That is too narrow a perspective towards design. When we talk about design thinking, it is not just about products. Design thinking must apply to products, processes, our plans - and even our policies. All these wide ranging challenges and problems can use design thinking, and if it is done well, it will benefit us much more than just meeting basic functional needs.
7. Speaking from the public service perspective, look at how Social Service Office (SSO) processes are designed. Look at how the new generation of public service centers are designed. They are quite different, I would say, from the previous generation of how we helped our vulnerable, how we provided services to fellow Singaporeans. Today, when we design a center, be it the SSO or the combined service centers, or the integrated service centers, they all start from the user perspective, by engaging various stakeholders on their different needs, their different perspectives, their different lived experiences to come up with the design. There are a lot of intricate details in designing not just products and services, but also the process of how we engage our people, how we help them, how we inspire them.
8. What about our long term plans? The most obvious example of this is our urban planning. On a large scale, how we design our MRT stations to the airports, to the ports and how we design the entire Singapore – 700 square kilometers to allow us to have all the amenities that we want, industries, living space and ease of transportation - we did all that to save energy, to have a clean environment. That involves very detailed design and a very deep understanding of the needs of our people and their aspirations. Again, it comes back to this: How does good design help us to engage, connect and inspire?
9. And of course, last but not least, even policy design is an important aspect of design thinking, be it education or healthcare. Take healthcare as an example - many people talk about the ageing population. How do we design our policies, integrate our lived environment, and everything else for a holistic solution for our growing number of elderly in Singapore? All these require a very sharp sense of how we do design thinking.
10. Then the question that comes to us and for many of the educators in this room is this - how do we get our students to be good designers? This is part of our 21st Century Competencies. What are the essential ingredients to be a good designer? Do we just wake up one day and the light bulb comes on and there is a good design? I always say that be it discovery or good design, it is the pursuit of discipline and inquiry. Good designers never fall in love with their solutions. Good designers fall in love with their problems and their problem statements.
11. So what are some of the competencies that we hope to see our children in our school acquire, to be good designers? First, a very keen sense of perspective of the problem. How do we define the problem sharply?
12. I recall visiting Temasek Polytechnic recently. They were using AI to help them iterate their interior design. All the AI software can help them save half the time that they used to before, but that was not the crux. After a while, they found out that the problem definition or what they call the prompt was the most important. You ask the wrong or woolly question, the AI program gives you a woolly answer. You ask a sharp question, the sharper your question, the better the AI will help you. But the AI cannot help you to ask a sharp question. That requires a very sharp understanding of the problem, so that is the first competency to help our children have a keen sense of the problem definition. Ask the right questions, ask the sharp questions.
13. The second thing I hope that all our educators will help our children to understand is diversity of perspectives. To come up with a good design, we need to understand the diversity of perspectives across stakeholders. Even a SSO is not just about serving the people who are coming to seek help, it is also about the people working there, the people who offer help. Every project and problem statement will have diverse stakeholders, with diverse perspectives and aspirations. This is something we hope that our children will grow up knowing, as part of our 21st century competencies.
14. The third thing I hope all our children will acquire is the skill to appreciate the diversity of problem-solving methods. Very often in Singapore, we are very logical, but we also tend to be quite linear in the way we think about things. There are strengths in being logical and linear, but they can also hold us back. What we want is to be able to increasingly form teams from diverse backgrounds with diverse perspectives on how to solve problems with diverse approaches.
15. A good example will be Republic Polytechnic's pedagogy – problem-based learning. Every week, teams of students are given a problem. There is no preset or prescribed way to solve the problem, and people come from different backgrounds and different schools. You can come from the engineering school, the sports science schools and so on. We want our children to appreciate that there are more ways than one in how we approach the issue and how we design the solutions because if we have these three instincts:
- A very sharp understanding and definition of the problem;
- Appreciating the diversity of perspectives;
- Appreciating the diversity of problem-solving methods
16. Then I think our children will grow up well and be able to value add to any companies and situations that they come across. How we approach and solve problems is a life skill.
17. This is why I am so happy to see DesignSingapore Council working on this closely with MOE and many other like-minded partners, including many industry partners who are here today for us to embark on this journey, to inculcate design thinking skills in our students starting from young.
18. If we can do this well, then truly in time to come, we need not fear that Singapore cannot distinguish ourselves as a nation, full of people that can value add to the world. Not just to solve or manage our own issues, but also to value add to the kind of problems that the rest of the world may be facing – it could be big problems like sustainability challenges, or it could be local problems of how a village can get fresh water.
19. Regardless whether the problem is big or small, there are three attributes that we must have in our children - a sharp definition and understanding of the problem, an appreciation of diverse perspectives, and an appreciation of the diversity of problem-solving methods.
20. And finally, please remember and share with our students the following things. They are short and quite easy to remember:
- "Every age can";
- "Everyone can";
- "Every idea counts"
21. There are perhaps a lot of misconceptions that only mature, professional people can do this but when you walk outside the hall, you see wonderful ideas from our young. If they have the confidence to do this from young, I am quite sure they will have the confidence to do this as they grow up. So, "every age can", and "everyone can" regardless of our backgrounds. It is because of our diversity of backgrounds that we all can bring something. That is why every idea matters and every idea counts.
22. If we can give our people this confidence, then we will have a much more confident society and a much more contented society. The ability to contribute, be it an idea or something else is not just the responsibility or the purview of those who have done well.
23. In Singapore, we must increasingly appreciate that the ability to contribute is from everyone and when everyone believes that they have the ability to contribute and their ideas count, we have empowered them with the most important gift. It is not just about financial health or anything of that kind, it is about the sense of dignity, the sense of pride that we can have in every Singaporean to contribute to the future of Singapore.
24. So let me once again congratulate DesignSingapore Council. Thank you for the work that you have done. I thank all the partners, all the educators who are walking this journey with us because what you are doing has a much larger meaning than just designing a simple product, process, plan or a policy. What you are doing is inculcating a certain set of values in our young that will put them in good stead throughout their life. What you are doing is inspiring people to come together to contribute, which will do wonders for the next lap of our country's development.
25. Thank you very much and have a wonderful day.