Tag: DesignSingapore Council

No Singapore Design Festival: So what?

There won’t be a Singapore Design Festival this year as the DesignSingapore Council reviews the format and content of this biennial event that has been held since 2005. Again, like a national design centre, it’s not the first time the government has organised a design event of this scale. In 1988, the then Trade Development Board (TDB) launched the International Design Forum, a biennial event held at the Raffles City Convention Centre that included an exhibition of world designs from the likes of Japan, UK and the US and also a series of talks by leading design studios of the times, such as Pentagram Design, Vignelli Associates and GK Industrial Design.


NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF SINGAPORE

The forum brought the spotlight onto Singapore design both here and internationally, helping to grow the industry and community here. However, after five successive forums, Business Times reported in 1998 that some wondered if the forum had become nothing more than a commercially-oriented trade show to sell design services rather than one that showed design in its “pure form”. There is no news if subsequent forums changed in response to this criticism, but it continued to be held three more times, in 2000, 2003 and 2005.

DESIGN FOR BUSINESS VERSUS DESIGN CULTURE

The final time the forum was held was together with the first Singapore Design Festival in 2005. It became just one event on a festival calendar that aimed to showcase design as more than just a business tool but also part of our culture and society. This expanded direction reflected its new organisers, the DesignSingapore Council, which was no longer overseen by an economic-driven agency, but instead housed under the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts.

According to the the festival’s press release:

 The most important differentiating factor of the Singapore Design Festival is the focus on the design process and the conceptualisation of ideas, as opposed to the showcase of static end products. In essence the Festival aims to transmute the design culture in Singapore and from around the world into an interactive and “live” presentation of the design process and its end products.

In my opinion, the festivals did bring this aspect of Singapore’s design culture out through exhibitions such as 20/20, Utterrubbish, and 10 Touch Points. But, by the last edition in 2009, even though the festival successfully hosted the Icsid World Design Congress, I felt what was presented to the public was more a trade show than a festival that looked at design culture.

Could this issue be at the heart of the current review of the festival? The issue of what role design is expected to play in the eyes of the government? Can design culture justify the millions being pumped into growing and supporting it?

A DESIGN FESTIVAL OF OUR OWN

When the Singapore Design Festival was launched in 2005, the architecture community also launched a similar event to bring architecture to the public. The Singapore Institute of Architects (SIA), a non-governmental organisation for the architecture community here, started Archifest in the same year to also reach out to the general public. The biennial event has grown from strength to strength and successfully held its fourth edition this year.

The design community has much to learn from this event as it has shown how a festival can be possible with the government playing a supporting role rather than as an organiser. One possibility is that design organisations like The Design Society and the Designers Association Singapore could take the lead. Or it could be a completely ground-up initiative as suggested by Felix Ng of Anonymous and Silnt during an interview: “We shouldn’t need a top-down approach to organise a festival. People on the ground can come together and do it. There are very capable and enterprising independent creators in Singapore, and we can come together and make a month of design here ourselves.”

A self-reliant community will better be able to steer how design should grow and develop rather than be at the whims and fancies of government policies. However, the biggest questions for many designers, I suspect, is why should I be forking out my own time and money for the community to benefit when I’m already struggling and busy enough? It is such a mindset that is preventing a more robust design community from emerging, and until that changes, the development of the entire industry is still going to be very much up to the government of the day to direct.

SG Design in 2025: A leap with the arts & culture

While the setup of the DesignSingapore Council in 2003 has helped design grow in Singapore, what is less discussed is the role the arts and cultural policy has played. The 1989 Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts set things in motion by establishing the hardware for a local arts and culture scene, and this was followed by the 1999 Renaissance City Report that gave it the necessary software. In the last two decades, designers have benefitted from the government’s cultural policy, growing closer to their cousins in the arts and culture scene, and allowing them to cross-pollinate ideas and foster a creative community  — or what has been once termed the ‘Singapore Supergarden‘. Of course, the loosening of censorship law over the decades has allowed more forms of expression and created more opportunities for designers to pursue creative excellence too.

Today’s report on the Straits Times about the recently setup Arts And Culture Strategic Review Steering Committee shows how much design has grown. Two of the 19 members in this committee that will “formulate concrete strategies to mould distinctive peaks of excellence that would differentiate and distinguish Singapore as a global city and nurture the creative capacity of people at all levels” are graphic designers: Chris Lee from Asylum and Theseus Chan of WORK. The rest of the committee is made up of members from the media, architecture, film, arts schools, and public service officers. Interestingly, there are no artists in this line-up to shape polices that will define Singapore’s arts and culture scene in 2025.

Could the favouring of designers over artists in the committee reflect an arts and cultural policy driven by economics? If it’s creative capacity we are seeking, shouldn’t artists be at the forefront of it and leading this committee? But if it’s artists grounded in a sense of economics we’re looking for, then a designer makes perfect sense — after all, in the past ‘graphic designers’ were known as ‘commercial artists’.

A late tribute to Dr Milton Tan

miltontan

 

On 8 November 2010, one of Singapore’s design pioneers, Dr Milton Tan, passed away. While working on a project recently, I got to learn more about the man, his efforts in promoting design through the government’s DesignSingapore Council (Dsg), and most of all, his ideas about design and creativity. This is my humble efforts to share his legacy with more people out there.

I never realised I had actually spoken to Dr Milton Tan until I decided to write this tribute to him last night. I was searching for some e-mail conversations I had with a friend about him when I found an e-mail that Dr Tan wrote to me six years ago. I was then an undergraduate working on a school project evaluating the Renaissance City proposal where for some reason I wrote straight to him — the Executive Director of Dsg — to ask for facts and figures about our arts and the economy. He did reply, and referred me to the right person to write to.

The only problem: it was nine months after I had sent the e-mail.

By then I had already turned to other sources for information, and in a fit of frustration at bureaucracy, I fired back an e-mail pointing out how ridiculous it was that I had to wait so long for a reply. To my surprise, he wrote back and agreed that it was unacceptable for me to receive a reply so late.

On hindsight, I think it’s actually amazing that Dr Tan even bothered to write back after nine months. To do so after so long suggests he genuinely wanted to help in some way. He could have just ignored my e-mail, and quite safely assumed that it had all been forgotten. But he didn’t.

Six years on, our paths crossed again. This time, I read about him in an upcoming article written by his former colleague and friend for The Design Society Journal. It’s a moving tribute about a man who helped lay the foundation for the government’s strategy for design promotion in Singapore in the new millennium. Dr Tan also kept a blog of his thoughts about design and creativity, and even talked about publishing a book. I’m not sure if the book will become a reality now that he has passed.

Here is a selection of some of his writings from his blog that really piqued my mind:

Hopefully, one day, these and more of his writings can be put together in a book to be shared with more. The last thing I have to say is to Dr Tan:

I’m sorry that this tribute came so late, “I agree that it is not acceptable for you to wait.”