The DesignSingapore Council (Dsg) is Singapore’s coordinating agency under the Ministry of Communications and Information, responsible for driving the design sector in Singapore. Its mission is to develop the design sector, and to help Singapore use design for innovation, growth, and to improve lives.

Dsg appointed Eden Strategy Institute to moderate and facilitate a full-day retreat for Dsg Board members and leaders from the private and public sector to review the long term strategic plans that would shape the future of design for Singapore.

APPROACH

Prior to the retreat, Eden identified and distilled key strengths, roles, and capabilities of Dsg via in-depth interviews, past reports, and trend research. This helped us design exercises that could elicit creative ideas from the Dsg Board Members and leading private sector designers in Singapore that we were co-creating the retreat with.

The event started off with three presentations by international experts to stimulate new paradigms for the future of Singapore’s design sector. This was followed by an internal review highlighting Dsg’s milestones in the past years. In this process, Eden distilled key trends from past Dsg engagements and initiatives, strengths, and challenges for participants to reflect upon. After setting the context of Dsg’s core competency and potential growth opportunities for the Singapore design sector, Eden led an envisioning exercise where participants crafted an ideal vision of the future of design for Singapore.

The envisioning exercise then set the stage for subsequent discussions at the retreat. We synthesized participant aspirations as themes that different workgroups could elaborate on. These themes covered the participants’ aspirations of design as a strategic economic contributor, and design playing an essential role in driving public sector innovation and nation building. Participants discussed in detail Dsg’s role in realizing these aspirations in terms of the success factors, time line, skillsets and resources required for operationalization. As the four workgroups shared their findings, Eden highlighted common initiatives across the workgroups and prioritized areas of focus for Dsg in the short, medium, and longer time horizons.

IMPACT

The session resulted in a constructive evaluation on Dsg’s long term vision and strategies by articulating focus areas for Dsg to align and build its core capabilities, rationalize its existing programmes and initiatives, and examine future strategies and resources that would optimally shape the future of design for Singapore. We subsequently went on to support Dsg in developing the Design 2025 Masterplan.