“The Age of Design”, was a buzzword the speakers used at the Design Education Summit 2018 (DES 2018). Held on Thursday, October 1, it was a platform for educators to learn from industry leaders in design.

When one thinks of design, more often than not, they are thinking about aesthetic and material design. Agreeing, Mr Chooake Wongwattanasilpa, Managing Director and Head of User Experience and Design (Singapore) at the Development Bank of Singapore (DBS), said, “ the public still thinks that design means making things pretty or doing Photoshop. But it is no longer like that. Design is a process sometimes. We design what could be a better way to do things.”
 
What Mr Chooake mentioned is essentially “design thinking”. It is best described as a new way to come up with solutions. It means thinking about the users’ needs from the perspective of the users themselves, trying to understand challenging previously held assumptions, and coming up with novel solutions to existing challenges.
 
Elaborating further, Mr Chooake added:, “Due to digitalisation, the possibility to apply design thinking is now available. For example, in the past, if DBS wanted to input the cash into the Automated Teller Machines (ATM), we needed to count the money by hand. But now, we have surveillance video, data and automation. But we need people to design those things, because machines alone are not enough. We need humans to imagine what it could be.”

Consequently, there is now a greater demand for such design thinking skills, with fellow speaker Mr Pascal Soball, Managing Director and Founder of Daylight Design (Germany), mentioning how these skills are enabling companies and organisations to answer questions in a whole new way. He said, “Design thinking has harnessed creativity in a way that business and education can benefit from because it’s put in a context.”
 
Giving an example, he mentioned, “If I’m designing a transportation system, I can design the vehicle, the routes taken and how those routes interact with each other, how to buy tickets and design the entire network.”

With current trends pointing towards increasing demand for such design-related skills, educators are learning how to teach their students such skills. Design thinking has allowed us to tackle new areas using design, but the issue now lies in equipping students with those relevant skills.

 
A representative of the organiser DesignSingapore, Miss Sheena Lai, said, “We hope that the Summit will serve to inspire educators on evolving global design, innovation trends and the value of design. We also want to provide the common platform for Singapore and international educators in design to exchange ideas and co-create solutions.”

By: Chin Zhi Hui Samuel