Design Scene Singapore‘Always a Better Way’ – the Singapore Design Festival |
| By Nick Charnley | |||||
 Both the old City Hall and old Supreme Court were used for the festival. As part of its sustained and determined effort to turn Singapore into the creative design hub for S.E. Asia, the DesignSingapore Council rolled out the second Singapore Design Festival last month. This year’s festival felt like an improvement on the first one two years ago, which seemed somewhat scattered. Using the Old City Hall as the festival HQ helped enormously in this. Besides being a place to meet and orientate oneself, the building also housed exhibitions and events on all four floors. With the Old Supreme Court next door also hosting large exhibitions, there was much to see and do in this one area alone. With Little Red Dots having an exhibit in Utterubbish at City Hall, as well as participating in Anita Neven’s My Universal House installation at the Old Supreme Court, I spent a lot of time at these two sites. As a consequence, I noticed a large number of people passing through these spaces, many of whom seemed to be students and tourists. Of course numbers do not in themselves equate to success, and the busyness of the main hub was by no means representative of the festival as a whole. With over 140 events taking place across the city, I felt the need to go out and get a broader picture. My efforts to do this were unfortunately hampered by a festival guide, which was confusing and frustrating on several levels. A cluttered layout with messy typography was the most apparent thing, but on trying to orientate myself further I found that it also seriously lacked structure. The event listing seemed random and incomplete compared to the festival website and when I found an event that seemed interesting I had to leaf to the back to find the address, which was very annoying. The most useful and informative part was the 20iSh picks – iSh referring to the company that published the guide. A calendar in the rear, which could have been useful, just made my eyes hurt. Whilst I dislike to be so damning, the last minute look and feel of the guide was really a big let down, especially considering the nature and scale of the event. The organisers could improve things drastically next time around by placing more importance on the presentation and structure of the guide so that it functions not just as a source of information but also as a desirable product that visitors would wish to keep and refer back to. Giving up on this, I resorted instead to getting a sense of how the festival was going via the exhibition openings and events to which I had been invited. Some of these included – the Utterubbish conference, the Iamacreativeperson conference, Groovevisions, My Universal Home opening party, Air Division’s new flagship store opening and Bright Sparks at Red Dot traffic. Through the conver-sations I had with people on these occasions, it was possible to get some kind of overall picture. A criticism that I en-countered on more than one occasion was that the festival hadn’t been well publicised. Generally speaking, I don’t read the newspapers here or watch the TV here, but I do travel on the buses where TV mobile, as inane as it is, sometimes carries snippets of interesting happenings on some of the arts programmes. Maybe I was just unlucky over this period but from what I remember there was no mention of the festival. Whether it was lack of publicity, or just local media disinterest, it did seem strange that the only journalists I encountered at the festival were all foreign. If the festival’s success is to be measured by the number of people passing through the doors of City Hall, it will be undoubtedly judged a success. Settling for this of course, especially when one considers the tagline ‘always a better way’, is not satisfactory and the organisers would do well to listen to criticism from the design community in order that this statement reads more than just an empty marketing slogan. In an effort to do my part, I intend to embark on researching the design scene in Singapore as it exists on an everyday level. Over the coming months I will meet and interview influential practitioners within the design community with the results of these endeavours appearing as a column each month in this guide. Hopefully, rather than simply being a narrative, the contribution can also begin to foster a dialogue not only within the design community, but with a more general audience as well. Only through open and honest discourse can we ever hope to begin to understand what constitutes ‘better’ with regards to design and how we can find the paths that will lead us there. Nick Charnley is a British artist and writer based in Singapore. He is also joint creative director of Little Red Dots, a Singapore based design agency co-founded in November 2004 with American artist Nathaniel Walters. Little Red Dots’ website can be found at - www.little-red-dots.com
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