Singapore’s government is pulling out all the stops to promote creative entrepreneurship in the city-nation.
In addition to studios, exhibition spaces, and a shop, Singapore’s National Design Centre is now home to three of the city’s public makerspaces, offering citizens access to digital fabrication machines, power tools, and electronics. Jeffery Ho, the executive director of the DesignSingapore Council, hopes that such prototyping labs will become as ubiquitous as photocopying shops once were. “If this is a successful model . . . we will go into the housing estates,” he says. “That is very relevant for us because we don’t have garages in Singapore.”
The DesignSingapore Council is an agency set up in 2003 when the nation began developing a creative economy. In just over a decade, it has nurtured a thriving design scene—Singapore was designated a UNESCO Creative City for Design last year—and is now set to forge closer ties with technology and entrepreneurship, in line with the government’s plans to turn the city-state into what it refers to as a “smart nation.”
