Forty-eight students from seven universities across 16 disciplines collaborated on design projects tackling climate change and UN Sustainable Development Goals. Teams prototyped solutions for sustainable consumption, cities, and industry while visiting Singapore and learning how to shape policy with their work.
Questions this video answers
Seven universities.
48 students.
2019.
SDG 12 (responsible consumption and production).
SDG 11 (sustainable cities and communities).
Chapters
We're here at the Science Technology Prototyping, Policy and practice workshop 2019 and we have seven universities, 48 students. So these universities send their best students from 16 disciplinary backgrounds to elaborate on the question of the future of urban society.
For me, the highlight of the workshop was the platform that it provided. It was a platform where you were actually able to explore even the most abstract ideas that you had. And just by working through them and thinking through them, in the end we would actually realize that these ideas weren't that abstract and crazy after all. And it was really cool that there was a space here that would allow you to do that.
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 highlight of this workshop for me was being able to work in such an interdisciplinary team and also with people from different nationalities and, and from cultures that are different from mine. So especially for myself, I come from a social scientific background and non technical background, but I got to work with mechanical engineers and architects and that really brought me out of the paradigms or the ways of thinking that I was used to.
Science and technology are wonderful and powerful tools to bear and shape the kinds of how we think of solutions to the wicked problems we face today. But we also think need to think of the societal and the policy dimension of those kinds of problems. And what I really love about this workshop is how we're able to think critically and in a nuanced way of kinds of ethical considerations. You know, how will these wonderful designs that students are coming up with actually be implemented? How feasible are they and in what kind of policy context are they going to be implemented in?
We are focusing on climate change and in particular trying to figure out how to put the policy in place to fund low carbon technology. The idea is, can we make Singapore a technology hub for the technology that will be able to be deployed around the world?
We are working on SDG number 12, which is about responsible consumption and production. We got a really interesting site to work on. It's actually used as a mall right now. It was a turf club Grandstand before. So it's interesting to see how this case of consumption and production and responsibility goes together with the future of the mall. So we are thinking more the mall about a community place, how we can engage people to think about alternative ways of production like involve them in growing food or repairing stuff, which from our view is really important. If you talk about sustainability and responsibility.
The sustainable development goal that my team chose was the goal number 11. It's called sustainable cities and Communities. So this goal, we focus on the impacts of climate change and then we are going to take a soft engineering approach, which is this carbon budgeting system whereby everyone is assigned a carbon budget. So if that carbon budget is being exceeded, part of that person's income will be deducted.
My group is working on SCG number nine, which is industry, innovation and infrastructure. And I think it's really interesting to work on that SDG in a city that really embodies urban planning and really thinking about the future.
We've had so many interesting experiences here in Singapore between the lectures and also lots of the site visits we had. For example, yesterday we visited a hydroponics farm, a city farm here in Singapore. And we're actually implementing hydroponics on floating soil, solar powered farms into our project and really trying to embody urban planning into our solution.
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 problems, challenges. And they were asked to collaborate in groups of six students.
With challenges that are possibly impossible to solve for a design thinking approach.
This workshop has told us, has kind of taught me to think from the ideal state and like the end goal and use that to guide how we're going to work towards it.
We all come from diverse backgrounds and myself came 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.
One of the interesting things is how they're thinking about the many different possibilities, possibilities of what future of Singapore might look like. And it's just not one future. There are many different possibilities and there are many different ways to arrive at those possibilities.
