As Singapore marks its sixtieth 12 months of independence, its design neighborhood continues to achieve worldwide recognition. From the fifteenth version of the President’s Design Award (P*DA) to the upcoming EMERGE @ FIND showcase throughout Singapore Design Week (11 to 13 September 2025), this milestone 12 months highlights the architects and designers shaping the nation’s artistic repute.
The President’s Design Award stays a key platform for recognising excellence throughout disciplines — from structure to socially pushed product design. In the meantime, EMERGE @ FIND, organised by the DesignSingapore Council in partnership with FIND — Design Truthful Asia, presents a regional showcase that places Singapore’s design management within the highlight. What’s rising is a transparent shift: native design is embracing bolder, extra experimental approaches that replicate each innovation and nationwide id. Because the world watches, Singapore’s design sector enters a brand new part — distinctive and prepared for a worldwide stage.
Gabriel Tan: Bridging Craft and Innovation with International Aptitude
In keeping with Gabriel Tan, the principal of Gabriel Tan Studio and Studio Antimatter, design ought to prioritise consolation, connection or sustainability over the abnormal. Working with trade titans like Herman Miller and B&B Italia, the Singaporean designer freely explores quite a lot of influences with out being constrained by native norms. His work — praised for its artistry and entrepreneurial spirit — combines Portuguese craftsmanship and Japanese woodworking with trendy innovation.
Picture: Tommaso Sartori.
Picture: Francisco Nogueira.
Though Tan is at present based mostly in Portugal, he continues to affect up-and-coming designers in Singapore. From co-founding Outofstock to beginning Origin Made, his trajectory exemplifies a singular fusion of enterprise savvy and cultural consciousness — enhancing Singapore’s standing as a worldwide chief in design. Tan undoubtedly received P*DA 2025 Designer of the 12 months along with his affect and physique of labor.
Alan Tay: Architect, Educator and Provocateur of Design Intelligence
Formwerkz principal companion and architect Alan Tay promotes design intelligence, which is the capability to analyse points critically and supply well-considered options. His work in Singapore, China and Malaysia over the previous 20 years has reinterpreted areas — from residences to mosques — with a eager consciousness of tropical settings. Architectural conventions are questioned by initiatives like Singapore’s Al-Islah Mosque and Malaysia’s Cloister Home, which encourage contemplation of type and function.
Picture: Fabian Ong.
Past his work, Tay mentors and teaches the subsequent technology, selling dialog in Singapore’s design neighborhood. His unwavering talent, contextual rigour and dedication to design that resonates each intellectually and visually are praised by the judges. With good cause, he received the P*DA 2025 Designer of the 12 months award.
Chicken Paradise: The place Structure Meets Conservation in an Avian World
In a dramatic shift from standard zoo structure, the lately constructed Chicken Paradise is a 17-hectare (roughly 24 soccer fields) reinterpretation of Singapore’s well-known Chicken Park. The mission — overseen by RSP Architects Planners & Engineers and designed by Mandai Wildlife Group’s inside crew — replaces cages with expansive, biome-specific aviaries that transport visitors to vibrant environments, reminiscent of Southeast Asian rainforests and African marshes.
Picture: Mandai Wildlife Group.
Picture: Mandai Wildlife Group.
“That is about creating experiences, not nearly showcasing birds,” says Rucha Khanderia, head of design at Mandai. Below the route of govt director Suen Wee Kwok, the design crew used what they discuss with as “the invisible hand” — delicate navigation, exactly positioned sightlines and microclimates that really feel pure reasonably than synthetic. Flocks can fly freely in eight walk-through exhibitions, a few of that are a number of tales excessive, permitting viewers to watch them at eye degree.
The jury recommended the best way Mandai’s conservation information and RSP’s spatial design mixed to ascertain a brand new commonplace for moral wildlife tourism. With 3,500 birds representing 400 species, the size permits for each intimacy and spectacle, from the quiet moments spent with critically endangered Philippine eagles to the joy of a macaw group in flight.
Kinetic Singapore’s “College of Tomorrow” Makes Sustainability Classes Stick
Kinetic Singapore companions Gian Jonathan and Astri Nursalim rethought local weather training with the cleverly subversive thought of a faculty the place sustainability is built-in into each course. Their College of Tomorrow exhibit reworked complicated ecological ideas into practical classroom eventualities. It was a mixture of immersive expertise and name to motion.
“Calculating carbon footprints was coated in math class. Mycelium supplies and polymers created from cassava have been mentioned in science courses,” says Jonathan. Guests have been engaged by the design agency’s light-hearted strategy, which framed pressing planetary teachings with acquainted faculty aesthetics (assume tables and chalkboards). Days later, Nursalim remembers preschoolers enthusiastically reciting options: “That’s once we knew the message caught.”
From repurposed supplies to interactive stations that introduced summary ideas to life, the panel recommended Kinetic’s ingenuity in integrating sustainability into the exhibition’s very construction. The crew demonstrated that environmental training doesn’t need to be didactic to have a revolutionary impact by fusing innovation and nostalgia.
Under are some Singapore designers making the world’s stage by way of EMERGE @ FIND, which returns to Singapore Design Week 2025 (11 to 13 September).
Sheryl Teng: Rewriting the Language of Textiles
Singapore designer Sheryl Teng treats each thread as a query. At her Loup studio and as an Interactive Supplies Lab researcher, she dissects clothes’s unstated guidelines — then reinvents them. Her work isn’t just about making textiles, however unmaking assumptions.
Take “Textiles in Translation”: a group that transforms flaws (like moth-eaten holes) into options. Machine-knitted geometries change into shape-shifting hybrids — neither fairly garment nor object, however one thing provocatively in-between. “I’m concerned with how supplies misbehave,” she says.
Teng’s apply — equal elements materials science and cultural archaeology — proves material could be each poetry and revolt. Each dropped sew tells a narrative.
E Ian Siew: The Alchemist of Air
Singapore designer E Ian Siew works with the invisible. His (Air)simply mission treats compressed air not as mere filler, however as a structural materials — one which bends gentle via pressure and collapse.
In his arms, pneumatic programs change into delicate choreographers. A bladder inflates; a type stiffens. Strain adjusts; gentle shifts from subtle to direct. There are not any switches right here, solely the quiet negotiation between resistance and movement.
Educated in digital fabrication, Siew straddles worlds — from medical gadgets to kinetic installations — proving air’s potential as each skeleton and pores and skin. His work asks: what if our environments might breathe?
Shervon and Melvin Ong: Weaving Time Itself
The Ong siblings don’t simply make objects — they orchestrate collisions throughout centuries. In Threads of Turning into Panorama, Singaporean designers Shervon and Melvin Ong combine lacquer threading — a conventional craft used for Buddhist effigies — right into a dialogue with 3D-printed geometries.
Working with lacquer-threading grasp artisan Andy Yeo, their hybrid artefacts emerge like relics from an alternate future: machine-born types wrapped in hand-laid resin threads, every bit thrumming with pressure between the devotional and the algorithmic.
AI-aided designs helped form the intricate particulars on these porcelain-glazed vases. Picture: Shervon and Melvin Ong.
“The thread remembers what the printer forgets,” Shervon observes. Their work doesn’t digitise custom — it provides craft new verbs.
Sophia Chin Finds Poetry in Singapore’s Ashes
Sophia Chin sees what others discard. Her Incinerated Ware assortment transforms Singapore’s municipal waste — incinerator ash — into beautiful porcelain glazes, every bit bearing the distinctive mineral fingerprint of town’s consumed stays.
The place most ceramicists import industrial glazes, Chin mines magnificence from native detritus, the ensuing tableware — heat, speckled vessels with the feel of weathered stone — carries the sudden palette of city metabolism: comfortable greys from burnt plastics, ochre streaks from natural matter.
“The ash remembers the whole lot,” she says. In her arms, even waste turns into a meditation on consumption, place and the quiet afterlife of objects.
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