Mushroom tables, drone bees and robot carers: what we discovered at Singapore Design Week

But it’s entirely true. In just one lifetime, the city-state has gone from a small developing economy to a global metropolis. Design and technology have played their part in this transformation, be it the towering skyscrapers built on land that’s been reclaimed from the sea, or the strategically placed parks that collect precious rainwater, handily bringing greenery to this highly dense city. Singapore is nothing if not man-made.

As the country celebrated 60 years since independence, it hosted a special Design Week, which ended last Sunday, under the theme Nation by Design. Through a range of exhibitions and installations across the city, the festival unpacked the role that design has played in Singapore’s history and explored its power to solve the biggest challenges facing our societies today.

For the fourth year running, the festival’s flagship trade event, FIND – Design Fair Asia, included a showcase of up-and-coming designers from across Asia: EMERGE @ FIND. This time around, there was an intentional focus on objects and products pushing beyond a vague notion of sustainability, with designs fashioned from waste and byproducts from industry.

“The whole idea is consumption. Even in this age when we’re focusing so much on eco, design is still often trying to come up with something that is sustainable in order to drive consumption,” said Edwin Low, the founder of local design store Supermama, who co-curated the showcase. “If we as designers are more intentional about the way we design, we can show a lot of opportunities.” Alongside co-curator Suzy Annetta, Low scoured the region – including, for the first time, China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan – and found designers working with this level of intention.

Cokorda Suryanata, the co-founder of the Bali-based Studio Banda, was there showing his Espresso Chair, with its seat and backrest made from coffee husks, a byproduct of the coffee industry. The husks are pressed into the desired shape and set using an all-natural binding agent; the final outcome is a material with a similar texture and sponginess to cork. “I was inspired by the way we press coffee to make espresso,” he said. At the end of their life-cycle, he explained, the seat and backrest “can be ground up and turned into compost.”

Bewilder is a local design studio that sprouted (literally) out of a business growing mushrooms for Singapore’s top restaurants. Its founder, Ng Sze Kiat, creates lamps and tables out of mushrooms and mycelium (the root-like structure of a mushroom). “I want to show that mushrooms can have a purpose from a design perspective, used as food and medicine, but also as a material,” he said. His designs look like something straight out of the apocalyptic TV series The Last Of Us. Has he seen the show? “I feel like the mushrooms have already infected me, to be honest,” he replied with a laugh, “because they’ve really taken over my life.”

But not everyone was totally won over. “I’m old and jaded enough to have been looking at mycelium-grown objects for literally 20 years now,” said Aric Chen, the director of the London-based Zaha Hadid Foundation. “Year after year we see them, in every design exhibition and biannual, and it’s always at the same stage of development.” Chen was the co-curator of the Design Futures Forum, a discussion-based part of the programme, which he hoped would bring more nuance to what he called “the outdated notion of design as a problem-solving exercise”. As he put it: “When you’re talking about these bigger social, planetary, ecological issues, there may be no such thing as a solution. So how do we change our thinking about design’s role in addressing them?”

Singapore’s 60th birthday as a nation was the subject of Future Impact 3: DESIGN NATION, an exhibition at the National Museum of Singapore. The show traced the history of design in the city-state, then presented a cohort of talented designers to watch in the future. “These Singaporeans were born in the 2000s, so they have a different mindset and sense of the possibilities,” said designer Hunn Wai, who co-curated the show. For him, the relative youth of the country presents an opportunity. “Think about Japanese, Scandinavian or Italian design and an idea pops into your head, how it looks, how it feels,” he said. “But for Singapore, the beautiful thing is that we get to contribute to that new reality.”

Nazurah Rohayat, a recent graduate from the National University of Singapore, was among the up-and-coming designers on show, presenting her project Tapestree, which aims to create a multicultural fabric pattern that doesn’t favour any one of Singapore’s ethnic groups. “I’ve talked to friends who have represented Singapore at international events, and they don’t really have anything to wear,” said the Industrial Design grad. “They end up wearing suits or even Uniqlo, or their own ethnic traditional dress, but it doesn’t really represent Singapore.”

Rohayat delved into her university’s archives and collated hundreds of historical fabric motifs from Singapore’s three main ethnic groups – Chinese, Indian and Malay – then trained her own AI model to combine them, giving each group equal weight in the resulting designs. The outcome is a series of patterned textiles that capture the country’s multiculturalism. “If I were to draw a Singaporean multicultural motif, I could do a good job, but I couldn’t ensure it’s equally representative,” she said. “Using AI eliminates that worry.” Rohayat’s hope is that the patterns will be incorporated into Singapore’s outfits for the next Olympics, which is where, she says, “we represent ourselves on the biggest stage”.

Across town at the National Design Centre, an exhibition called Unnatural History Museum took as its inspiration that quote from former prime minister Lee Hsien Loong. The show presented an array of man-made and technological innovations that have aided Singapore’s development, in displays cleverly dressed up to look like those in a provincial natural history museum. “We are an ideas-driven society,” said Pann Lim, the co-founder of local agency Kinetic, who curated and designed the exhibition. “We don’t have natural resources and there are a lot of restrictions on us. But, like any client brief, if you have lots of parameters, you have to think smarter.”

Among the “solutions” on display were miniature drones that can be used to pollinate flowers when real pollinators like bees become scarce, and so-called “cyborg cockroaches” that can be used in the aftermath of natural disasters to look for people trapped amongst rubble. We also saw humanoid robots that are being used today in the care of elderly people and dementia patients.

In truth, despite the whimsical presentation and positive framing, the show felt borderline dystopian (the way the robot carer sang will forever haunt me). Was that deliberate? “Life isn’t a bed of roses,” said Lim, with a smile. “These are the facts we are facing – we have an ageing population, rising sea levels, and global warming. We can either go crying or we can do something about it.”