Event Recap
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What do we love about Singapore and what would make us love our country more? What brings us together? What makes us tick? How do you gather data on the loveability of a city or country? And how do you interpret it for design-related outcomes?
Join us on 20 April 2021 for special insights into the research process and findings of the Loveable Singapore Project – an initiative led by the DesignSingapore Council. With the support of our valued partners, we’ve engaged more than 2,300 participants over a four-month period, resulting in excess of 9,000 minutes of engagement and insights. Join our researchers in an interactive webinar as they reveal some of the key findings!
Discover the participatory research methods deployed, and learn about process of making sense of the various data points. Then, join us for a panel discussion where we’ll dive deeper into the findings for greater clarity. Gain insights for possible new approaches to what seem like age-old issues or hunches about Singapore! Join in the conversation to help us shape the final report. We’ll also reveal the next stages of the study.
This is the third webinar in a series devoted to the Loveable Singapore Project.
About the Speakers
- Duleesha Kulasooriya, Executive Director, Center for the Edge, Asia Pacific
Duleesha is the lead strategist for Deloitte’s Center for the Edge–a Silicon Valley-based management research institute exploring the edges of business and technology. Over the past decade they have explored how the world is changing in very dramatic ways as a result of ever evolving digital infrastructure and liberalizing public policy, and its implications to us as individuals and institutions.
Duleesha has researched, written, and spoken extensively about dynamic ecosystems, emerging business landscapes, rethinking the role of firm and individuals in the form of institutional innovation, the future of work, and about relevance of ‘edges’ such as the Maker Movement, the Sharing Economy, TransTech, and Burning Man.
Duleesha was born in Sri Lanka, studied and lived in the US for nearly three decades and recently relocated to Singapore with his wife, three exuberant boys and a cat that thinks it is a dog.
- Prof Heng Chye Kiang, Provost’s Chair Professor, Department of Architecture, NUS
Heng Chye Kiang is Provost’s Chair Professor at the Dept of Architecture, NUS. From 2002-2007 he was Head of the Department of Architecture and from 2007-2016 the Dean of the School of Design and Environment. He is currently Director of its Centre for Sustainable Asian Cities.
He has been appointed visiting professor to several universities in China, Korea and Japan and is currently Honorary Professor at the CUHK and has a joint professorial appointment at Tongji University. His research covers sustainable urban design and planning, as well as the history of Chinese cities. He publishes widely; his books include Singapore Chronicles: Urban Planning (2018), 50 Years of Urban Planning in Singapore (2016), Re-Framing Urban Space (2015), On Asian Streets and Public Space (2010), A Digital Reconstruction of Tang Chang’an (2006), and Cities of Aristocrats and Bureaucrats (1999).
Prof Heng consults internationally on urban design and planning and is the conceptual designer of several award winning international urban design and planning projects, a recent one being the 2018 Cityscape Global Award for Masterplan Project. He also serves as editorial board member of several international journals and as jury member of many international design competitions in Asia. He was on the boards of HDB, URA, BCA, JTC and NMS and is currently senior fellow at the URA Academy and Centre for Liveable Cities. He is also a Board member of the Singapore Institute of Technology and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and member of the MND’s Scientific Panel. Internationally, he serves on Dubai 2050 Future Cities Council and is member of Dubai 2040 Masterplan international advisory panel.
Prof Heng Chye Kiang was awarded the Singapore Public Service Star in 2017 and the Public Service Medal and Public Administration (Silver) Medal in 2011.
- Dawn Yip, Coordinating Director, Partnerships Project Office, MCCY
Dawn is Coordinating Director, Partnerships Project Office, at the Ministry of Culture, Community and and Youth. The office spearheads the Singapore Together movement in partnership with public agencies and the people of Singapore.
Dawn was previously an independent consultant in foresight, public engagement and organisation development. She was also visiting faculty with the Singapore Management University Master of Tri-Sector Collaboration. Dawn was previously part of the Singapore Government’s Administrative Service, holding positions in the Ministry of National Development, Ministry of Health, Prime Minister’s Office, Civil Service College and Ministry of Trade & Industry. Dawn is a Harvard University alumnus and a Singapore President’s Scholar.
- Tong Yee, Co-Founder and Director, The Thought Collective
Tong Yee started out as a public school teacher. After setting up a successful community outreach program to provide tuition for repeat students in Singapore, he thereafter co-founded School of Thought in 2002 with Shiao-Yin Kuik and Elizabeth Kon to continue to promote educational innovation and civic learning for young adults. School of Thought has since evolved to become The Thought Collective, one of Singapore’s largest group of social enterprises that focus on building social and emotional capital in Singapore. Besides School of Thought, The Thought Collective consists of Think Tank Studio, a design and publishing company that specializes in content design and curation; Food for Thought, a socially conscious restaurant business; and Common Ground, a trisector social think tank focusing on social innovation and impact.
Tong Yee currently serves as one of the 3 directors of The Thought Collective – and is reputed for the work his team is doing in building up Singapore’s future social infrastructure. Tong Yee is highly sought after as an inspiring and innovative public speaker, trainer and thought leader. Having struggled through his earlier academic progress himself, Tong Yee has developed much empathy for people who have experienced failure in their lives, and channels this compassion to building sustainable platforms that support marginalised groups and causes. His work spans across innovative placemaking projects, curriculum design, organizational design, change management and social innovation.
He currently sits on a number of national committees including the Families for Life Council, and is a board member of the Singapore Discovery Centre. He formerly sat on the National Youth Council, Media Literacy Council and Advisory Council for Youth Corp Singapore and ACCORD. He was advised on the national review committee for National Education, as well as served on the Singapore Memory Project, and the SG50 committee. He represented Singapore as part of the speaker line-up for the inaugural Obama Foundation’s Asia-Pacific Leaders program in 2019, helping to train 200 emerging leaders from 33 nations.
- Dr. Adrian Kuah, Director, Futures Office, Office of the President, NUS
Adrian Kuah has the kind of career trajectory that calls to mind the phrase “short attention span”. It is also the kind of career path that traditional Asian parents wring their hands and lament about. After a series of twists and turns, Adrian is finally in a job that allows and empowers him to ask inconvenient questions, play the agent provocateur, and irritate the heck out of the NUS senior leadership.
Dr Adrian Kuah is the founding director of the Futures Office, National University of Singapore, an internal foresight think-tank tasked to ask fundamental, first-order questions and uncover hidden assumptions to draw insights about possible and plausible futures of higher education. Just prior to that, from 2015 to 2018, he was Senior Research Fellow and Head, Case Studies Unit at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. His research interests included futures thinking, education and public policy, and complexity science.
Adrian started his career in the civil service first as a foreign service officer with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and then as an economist in the Monetary Authority of Singapore. He subsequently left for the private sector as a business strategy consultant before embarking on an academic career with the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. As Assistant Professor on its Military Studies programme, he taught on the MSc programmes as well as the Goh Keng Swee Command and Staff College’s professional military education courses.
Undeterred and failing to learn from his first time around, he returned to the civil service for a second stint in 2013 as Lead Strategist in the Centre for Strategic Futures, Strategic Policy Office, Prime Minister’s Office, where he was involved in whole-of-Government futures research and scenario planning. He led a team of researchers in analysing complex, cross-cutting public policy issues across the social, economic, infrastructure and security domains. He also conducted training on futures thinking and complexity science for the Singapore Public Service at the Civil Service College.
On the strategic foresight and scenario planning front, Adrian has conducted numerous training workshops for students at the School, as well as for civil servants from a variety of government agencies. Such agencies include the Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Education, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore, among others. Externally, Adrian has also conducted training on scenario planning for the governments of Oman, Thailand, as well as the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG). In June 2018, he was asked by the President of NUS to conceptualise and set up the NUS Futures Office.
Adrian obtained his Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree in Economics and Politics from the University of York, graduating with first class honours, followed by his Master of Arts degree in International Politics from the University of Warwick. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Defence Policy and Economics from Cranfield University, where his doctoral studies were fully funded by RSIS.
Organised by the DesignSingapore Council and supported by the National Design Centre, in partnership with Centre for Liveable Cities, Deloitte Center for the Edge, Housing & Development Board, National University of Singapore, Participate in Design and the Urban Redevelopment Authority. In support of Singapore Together.
This event is part of the National Design Centre’s “Casting Hope” programme line-up for April-May 2021.
