Design Business Chamber Singapore (DBCS)

The creative community: How are your community adapting, both in terms of investment and communication strategy?

Many have been hit hard by the pandemic: staff let go and businesses unfolded. It is the sad reality of the social economic situation on a global scale. It has all the more reinforced our belief that partnerships/collaborations is the way to go as no man is an island and we are are interdependent. For this reason, DBCS is always on the look-out to collaborate across the different sectors - government ministries/agencies, social services, design community, business community, educational institutions, trade associations and chambers, overseas award organisers, etc.

Your future as an association: What has this exceptional situation taught you? To what extent will it affect the services you will offer within the community?

Just before COVID-19 became a pandemic, the DBCS Key Office Bearers met with the Presidential Advisory Commission (PAC) and took a decision that Design For Good will be the guiding principle for our corporate vision.

When the situation worsened and Singapore imposed a Circuit Breaker in early April, we quickly pulled together a taskforce comprising a few DBCS EXCO members and the Secretariat and swung into action an open call for the local design community called Design For Good. We posted 3 Design Challenges for the open call:
#1. How might we keep our community safe and healthy (in body and mind) during the global COVID-19 pandemic?
#2. How might we encourage our community to support one another and look out for those who are socially isolated (home-bound elderly, people with special needs, young parents, caregivers, etc.)?
#3. How might we learn from COVID-19 to reimagine our futures for life, work, learning and play?
More information about the Design For Good special projet can be found on http://designforgood.dbcsingapore.org/dfg/.

From the good response we've received through the Design For Good special project, it is a sign to us that it is a step in the right direction to build on our manifesto of Better Business by Design to use design for a greater good/cause. After speaking with different groups of stakeholders and with the expert advice of the PAC, chaired by Senior Minister of State for Singapore's Ministry of Communications and Information and Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth, we are in the midst of re-designing ourselves as a not-for-profit design business chamber, to not be constrained by the traditional mode of operation of many trade associations and chambers but to keep pushing the envelope, exploring new collaborations, listening to the needs of the community we serve. I am thankful that the DBCS EXCO is made up of multidisciplinary designers, design thinkers and business professionals who are forward-looking and not afraid to step out of their comfort zone.

The future of the sector: When we emerge from this crisis, presumably, society, the way of relating and consuming, will undergo a radical change. How do you imagine the agency / advertiser / consumer relationship after the crisis? What positive points do

This crisis has shown that human beings are resilient and have an innate ability to rise above adversity to not merely survive but to thrive. I believe that it has stopped us in our tracks to rethink priorities, way of life and work as well as mode of learning. We were heartened to receive many creative and ingenious ideas to the 3 design challenges within 2 weeks of the open call. The challenging time we're in has opened up opportunities to reimagine how life would look like in the new normal.

We've come to realise that conferences and high-level meetings can still take place without physically gathering. While technology has been thrust into the limelight, I believe that it's not the technology per se as some of the tools/platforms have been in existence for the last few years. It is the shift in mindset/paradigm that things cannot be "business as usual" anymore but to tap onto existing resources as well as create new means to adapt to the new normal.

I echo the words of Paul Daugherty, CTO of Accenture in his recent article on 'The future of work is probably not working from home': "We believe the future is really about redesigning work, that everything's virtual, so you never need to be physically together. We're focused on virtualizing the work itself so you don't have to be together, and then redesigning the workspaces so they suit how people will work together in the future. There'll be more convening spaces, more flexibility around how people come and go in the office. That's what we're prepared for. We're doing a lot of work reimagining the way we work. We think it will be substantially different."