Tag: Information Technology

Illustrating a More ‘Singaporean’ Digital Identity

From a public housing block to an otter, familiar sights and scenes of Singapore help create a delightful user experience in the redesigned Singpass app.

Void decks are a common sight at public housing estates of Singapore where most Singaporeans live in. These ground-level spaces are typically open and empty, except for a few sets of public furniture, to allow for various activities like weddings, funerals or simple hangouts with fellow residents. Now, void decks can also be found in the Singpass app!

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

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

#ADesignLibrary: A New Program for Graphic Design

Graphic design has traditionally been dismissed as “surface”, a subject more concerned with aesthetics more than anything else. Thus, a part of contemporary design education is often devoted to studying the profession’s history and theories to prove its deep connections with the world we live in. “A *New* Program for Graphic Design” by designer David Reinfurt (2019) is a “textbook” that sets out to do just that. Based on a series of three courses originally developed to teach graphic design to liberal arts students at Princeton University, Reinfurt takes us on an alternative path from graphic design as a commercial art to view it as an “interface” where various disciplines meet. He holds up the likes of printer-publisher Benjamin Franklin and designers Bruno Munari, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Muriel Cooper, to show how graphic design has also historically been produced at where it meets with printing, photography, art, mathematics, computing and engineering. Abandoning the authoritative air of traditional texts for education, Reinfurt invites students to explore the network of rabbit holes he has personally dug— and to arrive at their own conclusions on what graphic design has become.

#ADesignLibrary spotlights lesser known design books, and invites public access to my personal collection of titles that focuses on Singapore architecture and design, Asian design, everyday design, critical and speculative design as well as design theory and philosophy. I welcome enquiries and physical loans.