A brief lesson on digital service design — To my non-Singaporean friends: Teh peng is Hokkien for iced milk tea, and siu dai means “less sweetened condensed milk”. A few days ago, I tried to buy some drinks for my colleagues at a coffee shop. “Uncle, two teh peng, one teh peng siu dai.” “Huh? Two teh peng…

“Design is not a thing. It is a mindset.” — Tom Kelley In the image above, the mug on the left is handmade in Cape Town, designed by Mervyn Gers. Products like this are sometimes called ‘designer goods’. The one on the right is just a mug. A plain-looking, ordinary…

“This project will fail and they will call for you.” — A few days ago, I came across Philip Yeo’s recollection of the China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP) project. A familiar sense of futility, fear and dread slowly seeped through my chest, as I read his words: “When Lee Kuan Yew announced they were going into Suzhou, Dr Goh Keng Swee…

How I cleaned up hundreds of browser bookmarks in one afternoon — Today, I opened up all my bookmark folders. It has been a year since I last did so, and honestly, I felt a little dread in my stomach. …

Can you guess what website this is just by looking at these words? About us Topics News Events Publications & Statistics Careers Gallery Budget 2016 Let’s try again. Can you tell what you can do on this website by looking at these words? About us Careers Media Room Circulars E-Services More Feedback FAQS …

We released the alpha for an internal productivity tool a month ago — a room-booking chatbot for our humble office at the Sandcrawler. It was challenging to design a usable interface where we had little control of visual elements. In fact, the interface with a bot is mostly text. Thankfully…

Update / 27th July 2019 It has been more than a few years since I wrote this article, and I’ve also moved on to another team within GDS. Many things have changed; what you’re reading here is just a snapshot of the past. …

In the final year of my design education, I had to complete a 9-month long Final Year Project (FYP). Through this project, I was expected to demonstrate my conceptual and technical abilities honed over the last 4 years. In the midst of it, I made a huge blunder that sent…

One of my most embarrassing moments in design school happened in a class called Foundation 4D, where students were supposed to be taught the art of storytelling and communication. …