Not Just for Logging In: Redesigning Singapore’s Digital Identity App

The new Singpass reframes the app’s role as Singapore’s trusted digital identity platform while allowing space for its future expansion.

Every Singaporean and resident holds an identity card as proof of one’s citizenship and identity. Now, they can also have a digital version on their smartphones by downloading the Singpass app.

While this Digital Identity Card (IC) was introduced in Singapore’s national digital identity app in May 2020, few of its then over 2.5 million users knew of its existence then. Singpass had also been associated with simply authenticating and logging into government services online. However, the service set up by the Singapore government in 2003 had always been conceived as a national digital identity platform.

With the rebranding of Singpass in early 2021 to mark its evolution of becoming Singapore’s trusted national digital identity, the designers at Government Technology Agency (GovTech) decided it was timely to redesign the app.

➜ Read the full story on GovTech’s National Digital Identity Medium account

Thinking Ahead, Moving Forward

Entrances manned by security guards. Haphazardly placed paper signage for directions. Navigating endless tape to get in and out of buildings. Getting around the city can feel very much like entering a war zone nowadays. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only disrupted our everyday lives but our urban landscape too. The sudden need for new screening protocols has led to many makeshift solutions that have upended the design of places and fragmented them into ugly, awkward and even dead spaces.

While once regarded as temporary inconveniences, measures such as screening and social distancing look likely to become a permanent part of our everyday with cities planning to live with Covid-19 as an endemic disease. How they are integrated into our built environment needs to be re-examined lest they permanently remake the city into a fortress.

➜ Read the full column in CUBES #102 — Rethink, Reinvent

Going International to Become National: William Lee and the Modernisation of Singapore Design

The 1970 edition of “The ‘Whos’ in Business” is an over 400-page tome listing the who’s who of corporate Singapore and Malaysia. It is like any directory: lined with columns of bland corporate histories, occasionally accompanied by a mugshot or two of executives in ties. But page 467 jumps out. A dashing man gazes out of the top half of the full-page advertisement. Underneath the half-lit portrait are three lines that boldly declare:

he is new
he is very good
he is ours

It is a dramatic introduction to William Lee, the creative director and founder of Central Design. Just as “he” was styled in this advertisement like a hero in an action movie, Lee became a heroic figure in Singapore’s graphic design scene during the 1970s and 1980s. He gave many of the city-state’s corporations and public organisations a modern makeover by helping them adopt the “International Style”. The modernist visual language—as seen in this ad, with its san serif headlines set in single case and contents arranged rationally with ample white space—was advocated and adapted by William in multiracial Singapore to help it become internationally recognised as a modern nation-state.

➜ Read more in Further Reading Print No. 3