What is design?

Tired of design not being taken seriously in Singapore, Ziqq decided to seek out designers practicing in Singapore to get them to explain what ‘design’ is all about in front of his camera. His close to hour-long video, Design Says Hello, features a list of interviewees that include designers from the fields of graphic, product, interior, as well as design educators. Interestingly, despite the variety of interviewees, their view of design culture here turns out to be rather similar — a misunderstood profession, seen as just about aesthetics, thought of as peripheral… Design Says Hello brings out some very real issues in Singapore’s design culture today, but I’m not sure I had to sit down for an hour to just hear all that.

Design? from Design Says Hello on Vimeo.

Caught Moonlighting!

 

Moonlight

The personal project has become a necessary outlet of creative expression for many graphic designers out there today. Such a venture is very rarely about commercial viability. To some, the personal project is what keeps their soul alive while they sell out their creativity in their day jobs to bring the dough home.

In March this year, Asylum started an online publication that curates Question-and-Answer interviews with Singaporean creatives about their personal projects, or Moonlighting.

It’s already on its second issue. Flip through this online magazine here.

Information Explosion And Journalism

On a trip back to my alma mater today for a meeting, I chanced upon this article in the school’s newspaper, The Nanyang Chronicle, IEM pioneers worry about their jobs. It seems that NTU’s first batch of Information Engineering and Media students don’t really know what kind of jobs they can snag with their degrees. Here’s a suggestion: work as journalists.

Based on the curriculum outlined on their website, I think these students are equipped with the technical expertise and the visual skills to create data visualisation. This is a new form of journalism that will become increasingly useful in helping us make sense of a world increasingly awashwith data. Watch this excellent video, Journalism in the Age of Data, to figure what this is all about and some of the issues involved.

However, there is one issue that I think will severely hinder the development of this kind of journalism here — the lack of readily available data. It’s not that it isn’t being collected in this high-tech country, but such data is just not readily made available to anyone except the authorities. For instance, think about how every car in Singapore has an in-vehicle unit that generates a dataset about car usage patterns in Singapore. What is lacking, however, is the presentation of such data in a visual form to help the public better understand how our society depends on cars.