Short video transcript describing an ETH Zurich-organized workshop in Singapore (initiated by Sarah Springman and Gerhard Schmidt) focused on the future of urban society. The workshop emphasized policy design and real-world engagement with government, used design thinking and interdisciplinary teams to tackle complex urban challenges, and was shaped by Singapore’s constrained island context (notably supporting ~6 million people).
Chapters
So the whole experience started a few weeks ago with Sarah Springman, rector of ETH Zurich, having idea to create some kind of a workshop in Singapore. And we had the idea together with Gerhard Schmidt, to focus on the future of urban society.
I really appreciated the focus on policy and having some excellent lectures from world experts in policy design, people that actually do this in the real world and just exactly how that works. How do you communicate with government? How do you work with government? How do you make the science and technology have a real life impact?
The aim of the workshop is to tackle complex problems societies of the future will face. Singapore is an island state, a city state. So the question of the urban is foregrounded in this year's workshop.
Being Singapore played a crucial part in this because Singapore is a completely artificial environment.
There is no way that an island as small as Singapore would be able to sustain 6 million people. And so that meant that a lot of ingenious ideas had to be manufactured to make life on this island possible. And I think that had a direct impact on our projects and how we developed our ideas. I think if you had done this workshop in Switzerland, the results would be drastically different because just the scope of what you imagine possible in Switzerland is completely different to what you experience here.
What I like most about the workshop is to work in interdisciplinary groups with different people with different backgrounds and learning about new approaches.
We put them in a situation in which, like the open working group of the un, they had to negotiate that particular goal and then during the course of the two weeks to find potential strategies of how to address their challenge.
We thought that design could be the right platform, design thinking and design making in order to find, let's say, potential negotiations between the students in order to solve certain challenges.
We all come from diverse backgrounds and myself being from engineering, I know a limited. I have a limited knowledge about structure. But in the design thinking process, we are put together with a group of people who come with diverse backgrounds. And during the brainstorming process we come up with really amazing ideas. I'm from mathematics, so it completely takes me out of my comfort zone, I would say, because you have to talk about general ideas and concepts and to work in a team, which is also something I'm not usually doing. So that really took me out of my comfort zone, but I really liked.
Has been something new, something that goes beyond the standard scholastic approach of university. And I think when I go back and apply this new knowledge or this design thinking approach to my own problem in my fields, that will really help us or help me and then my group go forward with better solutions.
