As the CEO of DP Architects, one of Singapore’s largest architecture practices, Seah Chee Huang navigates professional and corporate leadership with a strong impetus to deliver purposeful outcomes for people and planet. Beyond the studio and the boardroom, he is bringing that same drive to Singapore’s classrooms, having led the inaugural National Design Project for students in 2023.
When structural engineer Dr Hossein Rezai received the ‘Designer of the Year’ accolade for the President*s Design Award in 2016, the Jury made note of his “holistic vision” and his “aspiration for engineering to achieve a higher purpose”. Now, in a global design role at Ramboll, he is using that same visionary spirit to chart a course for his colleagues in the climate crisis era. For Rezai, all roads lead to regenerative design.
In Singapore, there are just a handful of people known for writing dedicatedly about design. DesignSingapore Scholar Justin Zhuang is one of them. His pathway to thinking critically about design developed naturally as a by-product of his curiosity about history and culture. Now playing his own part in documenting the history of Singapore’s design, he is helping us understand our designed present and future.
Over the last two decades, Hanson Ho has developed a celebrated body of contemporary and distilled designs that have represented Singapore to the world. The recipe for his creative success? A systematic design approach to efficiently produce clean and modern visuals that are easily understood by diverse audiences.
In a career spanning almost 25 years, he has gone from designing just for print to branding the interiors of retail, restaurants and hotel chains through his firm Asylum. Confronting the latest digital disruption of the creative industry, the designer is making yet another transformation – one he sees as the way forward for designers to thrive in the future.
How can we balance production and consumption with a finite pool of resources? The challenge is particularly pronounced in industries such as fashion, but even there it is possible to operate with less wasteful outcomes and nudge consumer behaviour, while upholding principles of quality and longevity. GINLEE Studio shows a way forward.
She began as an outsider in design, but over the last two decades Kelley Cheng has brought designers in Singapore together through a magazine, and subsequently, spaces for creatives to connect. These platforms lay the foundation for the creative community who have propelled the growth of Singapore’s design industry. As the designer enters the third decade of her career, she has embarked on a new project to connect young designers with mentors to create a better future for Singapore design.
How can life be lived better? How can we be better at thinking creatively? How can creative processes be better? Evolving from traditional industrial design to the realms of design research, education, and creative advocacy, STUCK Design consistently looks for ways to make a positive difference – always with a human lens.
