Visions of the Future

Visions of the Future is a curated showcase of seven designs by emerging Singaporean designers.

Each design has been hand-selected for its visionary approach to current issues, with key focuses of the showcase looking at the improvement of health and wellbeing, designing for multigenerational living, sustainable processes, new materials and safety through design.

Thursday 10 December 2020 – 07 January 2021 | 9 am – 9 pm | Free Admission | National Design Centre, Atrium, Level 1

The designers have been mentored throughout the process by the established design duo Wendy Chua & Gustavo Maggio, and have adapted admirably in developing products that respond to the new pandemic world that we find ourselves in. Come visit the exhibition and see how the design solutions help answer the question, “how might design help us to thrive despite the challenges of the moment and reimagine hope in such dire times?”

Singaporean Designers Offer Visions of the Future

This year has proved to be a pivotal moment in history when we are afforded the opportunity to rethink both the present and future. In Visions of the Future, eight Singaporean designers have the opportunity to showcase their ideas. By Yvonne Xu

An initiative of Singapore’s national agency for design, DesignSingapore Council, Visions of the Future is in every way a response to the current pandemic reality. For one, it’s presented smartly for a socially distanced audience — accessible both online and onsite. Its real-life iteration at Singapore’s National Design Centre takes the form of wave-like displays, their peaks and valleys elegantly spacing out each exhibit.

Exhibition designers and curators Wendy Chua and Gustavo Maggio (of multidisciplinary design practice Forest & Whale) were inspired by the peak-and-trough patterns of COVID-19 infection cycles and refer to the idea of ‘riding out the waves of a pandemic’. Implicitly perhaps, the exhibition also signifies a new wave that’s coming into design thinking at a time of converging crises.

‘We made the decision not to create a brief that designers would respond to. Instead, we wanted to curate a collection of future narratives seen through the eyes of young designers,’ Chua explains. The seven proposals from eight designers were selected through an open call in 2019, and were originally intended to be presented at Milan Design Week in 2020. Though plans for Milan were thrown out when the design event was cancelled due to the pandemic, Chua says all of the proposals, which deal with issues like climate change and mental well-being, only gained more relevance and meaning through the subsequent events of the year.

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Panel Discussion: Design for a Post-Pandemic World

Thursday 7 January 2021 | 6:30 pm 7:30 pm | National Design Centre

Join designers Kevin Chiam, Yingxuan Teo, Sheryl Teng & Poh Yun Ru for an in-person panel discussion on the topic of Design for a Post-Pandemic World, talking about the ways society has changed, might change or should change as a result of the pandemic. This talk will also be available to watch live on this page.