As envisioned in INDEX: strategy, these communities expand and enrich the deepening network of powerfully committed societies now devoting rich resources, expertise and urgency to the global drive called into being by Copenhagen's concept. In keeping with the great Danish traditions of humanist intent, the Partner Cities of INDEX: will one day stand as watchtowers arrayed around the world, proud beacons of the promise of intelligence bent to the service of humankind.

In speaking with Dr. Milton Tan of Singapore, DesignToImproveLife.dk had a chance to explore what has motivated a much-honored city-state like Singapore -- a powerhouse in global commerce and a leader in innovative concepts of national selfhood -- to seize the distinction of becoming the first Partner City of INDEX: for 2008-9.

We hope you will join us in welcoming Singapore to the vanguard of the movement. There could be, surely, few more eloquent spokesmen than Dr. Tan for what Partner City status means -- and for the position, unique on Earth, of Singapore.

Surely this is, as Dr. Tan explains, our gateway to the future.

Designing SINGAPORE'S
'Gateway to the Future'

Tan is one of the 11 international jurors whose expertise and practiced sensibilities go into the selection of the biennial INDEX:Award winners.  A fellow with Singapore's Ministry of Information, Communication and the Arts -- seconded from the National University of Singapore to pioneer national strategies for the city-state's creative industries and design, he is also the Founding Executive Director of the DesignSingapore Council and holds a Ph.D. in design creativity from Harvard.

Irony is never far from his conversation. Quick to laugh, easy and affable in his sharp observations, he's ready as soon as anyone cares to ask how partnering with INDEX: makes sense in the Singaporean ethos.

"We are a small, very unlikely place. It was swamp. It wasn't even loaded with oil and rich minerals you could dig up from the ground. So Singapore had to be connected from Day One. Because you have nothing to depend on" when you're on an island at the tip of the Malay Peninsula.

As early as the 14th Century, sea routes made it a provisioning point, but even its name is said to have come from a visitor's mistake when a Sri Vijayan prince mistook a local animal for a lion ("singa") and called the place Singa Pura, or Lion City. Modern Singapore was founded in 1824 and identified by the British as a free-trading way-station for fleet stopovers. After World War II, Singapore was made a British colony, achieving self-rule in 1959 and independence in 1965.

"Singapore started not even as a natural settlement," Tan says, "because for one thing, the land to the north and south was more fertile for agriculture. The waters" in other areas "were cleaner for better for fishing.

"It was a stopover. Singapore was a pit-stop for shipping," Tan says. "The only people who needed to stop there found it was a convenient location between the Western Markets of Europe and parts of Asia.

"And so from the earliest times, this theme of being a hub was a central key for Singapore. First with shipping. And then with air transport, cargo and then travel. But of course, other places then were competing -- once air had come in, not everything needed to go by shipping.

"In the last 40 years or so, because of electronic funds transfers, Singapore had to figure out how to be connected to the financial markets in such a way that we could move money quickly, you had to move it after one market closed in one part of the world and before another market opened in another. And no capital to start with -- this is part and parcel of the whole set-up. Singapore has had no natural resources of its own it has had to figure out how to get other things to flow through.

"I like to think of it as a space station. Virtually every food item is imported. Even water is imported, we're not self-sufficient in water. To be there, you have to find some other way to afford your food. So how you build up your wealth in a situation like this is the fundamental question. -- You build connections.

"Everything is subjected to that model. Take education -- we don't just do education for local consumption, instead we provide it as trading in knowledge. So as in the old days the ships would come, today students come.

"Now, With design being the new kid on the block," in a contemporary understanding of itself as that proverbial "space station" of the early 21st Century, Tan says, "Singapore must build alliances, our links with the equivalent today of important seagoing trading partners of the past.

Today, Singapore has 4.5 million residents in its cosmopolitan population.

The last quarter of the population is by immigration, Tan says. "So the demographic profile has changed. It's more international than ever. Education receives very high attention. If there's any natural resource we can claim, it's education.

"And so the partnership with INDEX: is a natural for us" in this new wave of Singapore's drive for connectivity. "Also London, of course. Even the Venice Biennale. These are all very natural for us to be connected to."

Tan's DesignSingapore Council is preparing a major event for late November, coinciding there with the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design's (ICSID) world design congress. Singapore Design Festival 2009 will stage Design 2050, a suite of specially commissioned outlooks in Design to Improve Life.  Such issues as healthcare to come, the human effects of mounting levels of mobility, the future of urban living and architecture's place on a horizon we can't even see yet, all these are featured in the plans for November's festival.

Beyond the preparations and delivery of the coming festival, "One of our biggest challenges now" in Singapore, Tan says, "is to see design made a 'core competency' in education. We would like to see design listed alongside reading, writing and arithmetic.

"The trader mentality has been central to our mindset for so long. And a trader doesn't create anything. He buys low and hopes to sell high.  He is opportunistic. So if a particular item is profitable, he'll trade in that. That clearly is OK. But you know, the competition catches up.

"If other traders have the same access, knowledge, technologies, then they are catching up. We were concerned at first that the efforts we wanted to introduce for the last five years -- about creative economic initiatives -- might not be well-received. But, in fact, the reception has been very encouraging.

"And so we have hopes that if young people in Singapore are inculcated with design thinking through the education system now, then businesses from around the world will find Singapore an appropriate environment in which to do creative work."

If Tan's dream is achieved in its "Design for Enterprises" format created by his DesignSingapore Council, then Singapore will once again have pushed ahead into a higher orbit, that "space station" again floating as a hub of intersecting knowledge and commerce, this time by leveraging design thinking to build a platform for creative industry.

"We have a couple of advantages," he reminds a listener. "You know, no historical baggage, no dominant culture -- therefore, quite programmable" in educational curriculum terms.

As an example, Tan reveals, "this came about only some three years ago. We were in talks with BMW to set up a center in Asia. And we ran out of things to say to them, to be honest, because we were using concepts that were overused.

"Like 'gateway to the East,' the old shipping idea. A graphic idea. That kind of model was OK, but didn't quite apply. Why use a 'gateway to the East' when everyone can go straight to the East?

"Then we thought of 'soft landings,' because Singapore speaks English, as a transitional field on the way from West to East. But that wasn't it, either. Those concepts are borrowed from the West.

"And so we said, 'Look, we need a new concept, new positioning.' And we came up with this: We said to BMW, 'we're the gateway to the future.' We switched from the geographic dimension to the time dimension. And it worked really well.

"The 'gateway to the future' concept means that you work on things ahead of time. And as it turns out, what you need, in order to work on things ahead of time, is to travel light. You want your 
teams to feel they can be free" to develop corporate strategy and presence without constraints that other national cultures could impose.

"So that concept," Tan says, "illustrates the importance for us in Singapore of partnerships like 
this one with INDEX:. It's connection.  In fact, it's the inter-connectivity of design we need now, with architecture, media, product design, fashion and so on.

"This partnership is a natural."

Read more at http://www.designsingapore.org


Written by Porter Anderson