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Three President’s Design Awards winners offer some lessons

SINGAPORE — Playwright George Bernard Shaw once said: “Those who can’t, teach.” But three of the recipients of this year’s President’s Design Award have proven that those who can, also teach. After all, Patrick Chia, Richard Ho and Pann Lim are acclaimed designers and also teachers.

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SINGAPORE — Playwright George Bernard Shaw once said: “Those who can’t, teach.” But three of the recipients of this year’s President’s Design Award have proven that those who can, also teach. After all, Patrick Chia, Richard Ho and Pann Lim are acclaimed designers and also teachers.

The trio were named Designer Of The Year at the annual President’s Design Award last night at the Istana together with fellow recipients fashion designer Alfie Leong, floral designer Harijanto Setiawan and architect Yip Yuen Hong. Nine designs also received Design Of The Year awards.

“We have to train our own (designers),” said Chia, founder and director of the Design Incubation Centre (DIC) at the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) School Of Design And Environment. “A nation that is able to capitalise on design at all levels of its economy and society will have a huge competitive advantage. To do that, we will need to have the best design minds for the job. We can’t buy or import them.”

It’s a point that fellow winner and architect Ho expounded on. As an adjunct professor with the Department Of Architecture in NUS, he writes the design programme for students taking the Architectural Design module.

Lim, who is Creative Director of Kinetic, mused that while the President’s Design Award is a recognition of what you’re doing for the industry, it’s in giving back that truly matters most for the future of it.

 

PANN LIM, THE GRAND STUDENT

As a student at Temasek Polytechnic, Lim started out with projects that paid him S$50 while hustling for jobs at Far East Plaza. Today, he is a creative director who has more than 300 awards under his belt. He credits his success to the winding road that brought him to the industry — one that includes failing his English during the O-Levels, entering a pre-university centre and Tampines Junior College, before flunking his A-Levels and trying out Temasek Polytechnic upon the recommendation of a friend.

“I suddenly had a sense of direction; I fell in love with advertising and my wife, whom I got to know on the first day of school,” he chuckled.

A self-confessed “emotional guy”, a very grateful Lim started lecturing at his alma mater last year. On top of this, he is heading the education team of his agency, which includes giving talks in schools about design thinking. He is also a mentor with Noise Singapore’s Apprenticeship Programme.

And he reckons he benefits from all these, too. “I’m not just exporting my knowledge. I don’t think I’m their senior. I get inspired by them, their ideas and we feed the energy off one another,” he revealed. “I’m the same way at work. The KPI I set for myself is for my staff to leave with a portfolio that’s twice as good as when they first came.”

His passion for teaching could be due to the influence of his parents: His mother was a Chinese teacher, while his late father taught music. “My father always said, ‘Do properly’, in Hokkien. When I started working, I began to understand what he meant — it’s about seeing something through from start to finish and ensuring the best you can give.”

 

RICHARD HO, THE BUILDER

Ho turned 57 last week, but he’s hardly taking it easy at work. “I’m all the more motivated. The award encourages me to work harder,” the youthful-looking architect said. “Of course, you don’t work to win awards, but it’s nice to be recognised by the state and fellow design colleagues.”

What’s nicer to Ho is seeing his students appreciate the responsibilities of being a Singaporean architect and taking cultural context into account when designing a space. This comes as no surprise. Ho is known for his work on conservation houses and champions a Singaporean brand of architecture that is a mix of everything, from contemporary influences to indigenous South-east Asian design. In fact, to emphasise the importance of local context and urban conditions, he takes his honours-year students to a developing South-east Asian city every year.

“These are cities where English isn’t widely spoken. I want them to be out of their comfort zone and demand they talk to the people to understand the problems before coming up with a master plan. You can’t improve a situation until you know the problems,” he explained. “It sensitises them to read a city.”

Ho feels the young need to be interested in “our own backyard”. It would help them become more thoughtful architects. “If you don’t understand our local context, then anything goes,” he said, ruing the fact many in the industry are too blinded by fashionable design mags and how buildings nowadays don’t take into account the Singapore climate or environment. He cited “eye-openers” such as People’s Park Complex and the original SIA building as examples of what had inspired him as a budding architect and he hopes more of his younger counterparts would find their own style, instead of apeing foreign architectural stars.

 

PATRICK CHIA, THE TRAIL BLAZER

As the founding director of what is billed as “Singapore’s first dedicated industrial-design laboratory”, Chia has steered DIC towards success.

It has received accolades from the likes of Reddot Design Awards and is a regular in international design magazines as well as lifestyle titles such as Wallpaper, Monocle and Vogue Living — thanks in part to d.lab, the commercial entity of the centre, which designs clever, beautiful creations.

Chia has now published a book, Design Incubator: A Prototype for New Design Practice, as a way to “take stock”, while giving readers an insight into how things were dreamt up at the centre.

“We wanted to expand the possibilities of design practice in Singapore. Now our graduates are not only working in manufacturing but also in non-traditional design areas such as hospitals, banks, insurance companies,” he elaborated. “Because the solution to a problem could be a product, a service, a process, a new business model, a trigger or a nudge which changes behavior and habits.”

His teaching philosophy has always been to let students find their own way, noting that teachers and schools do not have all the answers, too. “It’s is more about how the students learn and much less about how we teach. It will be impossible to have a faculty which knows everything. The question is then: How do we teach things that we do not know or have no domain knowledge of? We have to be creative and be comfortable to say, ‘I don’t know’.”

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