Curator’s Playlists

With the idea of the student being "prepared" as insufficient, Laura McBain considers the educator as a Futurist - she has helped school leaders build their adaptive capabilities to become navigators of their shifting context. A broader look at her practice as former teacher, principal, and now co-director of K12 Lab at D.School (Stanford), she sees creativity as a key ingredient in addressing challenges facing schools today.

Donn Koh has been experimenting with the generative capabilities of artificial Intelligence (AI) and human creativity. The future he envisions where AI and human ingenuity amplifies innovation is practised in the design consultancy he leads, and developed as an experimental curriculum for design students.

Professing empathy as her design superpower, Diana uses it to tailor programmes for learners from an urban multicultural context to rural indigenous communities through a whole-person changemaker framework rooted in developing a young person's sense of identity, belonging, and agency. Additionally, adopting Learning Experience (LX) Design was fundamental in building her company, Diana breaks down her approach in great detail where you can consider introducing it into your own environment.

The World Economic Forum has described the significance of competencies and character qualities such as creativity and curiosity. Believing success is multi-dimensional and soft skills are critical in shaping the future of work, Felix Tan helps graduates evidence their 21st-century skill sets through his cross border job matching initiative for Gen Zs. He is passionate about equipping the young with resilience and adaptability, and argues that we inadvertently fail our young by shielding them from failure. 

Laura McBain, one of the speakers introduced in the last playlist, wrote a book that shines a spotlight on mistakes as well – the stories in My Favourite Failure provide insights on how setbacks lead to learning and growth.

While innovation accepts failing forward as a vital part of its process, there are also many fascinating lessons to learn from the Museum of Failure's collection of amusing failed innovations from around the world.

If all things fail, try a failure bow!

Food for thought: the story of how cake mix came to be has all the right ingredients for a design story - an excess of molasses forced exploration into new use cases; reframing the selling of just flour to selling convenience; and a dose of creativity that ultimately saved cake mix.

In the local context, the approach behind baking ingredients supplier Phoon Huat's successful reinvention of their stores is based on people centred design and experience prototyping in real stores. An empathy driven (design) process as such often generates qualitative data that is messy. Khai Seng has developed techniques that generate insightful statements that prompt action. At the same time, he believes that intentional design can evoke a meaningful experience - whether it's a product, a building, a service or a piece of music.

For School of X, the classroom is the world around us, where Tamsin and her team actively teaches people how to bring positive change to their communities through design, championing topics such as building better bonds between fathers and children or creating better career prospects for persons with disabilities.

Clement's approach to teaching coding and electronics stems from his background in design; his students escape the "black box" and learn to create their own electronics from scratch instead, which helps them acquire a profound understanding of physical computing.