Design can create a better world as the process builds empathy and helps us see the world from the perspective of others, says the former art teacher turned designer. The DesignSingapore Scholar wants to empower more communities to harness the power of design to improve their lives and the lives of others too.
At the age of 44, most people are at the peak of their careers. Chan Li Ping, however, is at the start of a new one. After two decades of working – first teaching art and then working with start-ups to develop wearables – she is going back to school to obtain a degree in design. In 2024, Chan enrolled in a graduate programme with the support of the DesignSingapore Scholarship – becoming the oldest recipient at the time of award since the programme was launched twenty years ago.
“My peers are like from the first and second batch of scholars. I’m starting this journey really, really much later than most people,” she says.
The later start also meant Chan had more time to hone her craft. In her first job as an art teacher in a junior college, she taught many students who have entered the creative industry, including as designers. They even inspired her to start A Craft Initiative with her husband in 2011 to fabricate bags from deadstock textiles under the brand Uyii. The duo subsequently turned it into a consultancy specialising in teaching sewing and helping others manufacture small batch productions. The latter included prototyping wearables for start-ups, many of which are led by engineers and technologists.
All these people did not see me as a designer, more like a person who makes their things. But I was making decisions on where to put their technology, how the whole thing is structured or whether it should be modular or not. When you start to execute these decisions, I realise that I’m designing this thing already.
— Chan Li Ping
However, she did not feel ready to call herself a designer. This is was when she began thinking of learning more about design.
Empowering people by design
The next step in her career became clearer in 2019 when Chan participated in an artist residency organised by Superhero Me, an inclusive arts collective in Singapore. While working with special needs children, specifically nonverbal ones, she witnessed their struggles in communicating when they had difficulty searching for words in a book. Chan wondered if there could be a technology to help the children quickly express themselves, just like how Google search prompts suggestions based on the input of users. It led her to collaborate with fellow resident artist Ng Fong Yee – who was awarded the DesignSingapore Scholarship in 2023 – to develop assistive technologies that track eye-gazing and body movement for the children to create art. Chan helped to conceptualise the design and pulled together the technologists to develop the actual solutions.
The project demonstrated to Chan that design can empower communities, particularly those in underserved segments, by developing innovative solutions. It also reminded her of her late father who lost his ability to speak and move in the final years of his life due to a neurological disease. There were many times when Chan saw opportunities to redesign the things he used, such as his wheelchair, to make life more comfortable for him. These experiences motivated her to pursue a Master of Science in Disability, Design and Innovation programme at the University College London where she explores how design can better support people with disabilities.
To design something that is customised but affordable is always a challenge for people with disabilities because at some point every disability is in a way individual.
— Chan Li Ping
Although design practices over the years have evolved to become more inclusive, many of the existing solutions, she observed, seem to be coming from the perspectives of able bodied people. Chan is thus determined to create more room for differently abled people to actively participate in the design process, especially since everyone will experience physical or mental decline with age.
One of the things I’m interested in is what are some structures that could enable some form of co-creation that is sustainable over a long period of time. Are we able to enable people to find a way to feel like they can find solutions for themselves?
— Chan Li Ping
This was what inspired A Craft Initiative to teach sewing, after Chan noticed many of her customers did not know how to alter their clothes. Similarly, she believes design is a vital skill that will empower people to tackle challenges on their own.
“For me, it’s very important to enable others to have this sense of agency in their own lives,” she adds.
Teaching design for a better world
Chan’s idea of design used to be limited to the realm of object-making, until she began working with designers. In 2017, she collaborated with STUCK Design to develop Made Fit, an app that uses algorithms to recommend custom pattern blocks for various body sizes. The project, supported by the DesignSingapore Council’s then Design Collaboration Assistance Grant, came about after Chan noticed the challenges her students faced while drafting patterns to fit their bodies, which come in all shapes and sizes. The experience helped her realise design could be a way of responding to problems all of us encounter in our everyday lives.
Design is not just about thinking in terms of function, but within a bigger picture of how it operates with different people. Or doesn’t even work with people. As a designer you are kind of in-between things, and a lot of design is actually about providing a service to other people.
— Chan Li Ping
It is why empathy is a key part of the design process, she adds. This is something Chan often found lacking in the science-based disciplines she worked with. She hopes to embed design into other disciplines in the future so that more people can see the world from the perspective of others and even try to improve it for them.
Design has a very utopian ideal embedded in it. Design is always trying to do something better than we have done before. Maybe we cannot change the world, but even a little step works as it can channel more steps that can lead to a domino effect in that direction.
— Chan Li Ping
And as Chan has shown, it is never too late to take that first step.
