Should every country have a design minister?
Why national design policies and even design ministers could reshape our collective future
Walking into Dear Designer
It was a little surreal to see throngs of familiar faces streaming into the convention hall. After picking up a digital yellow invitation, titled ‘Dear Designer’, I expected to see a small yet intimate session of a few designers in a focus group. To my amazement, I saw a sea of tables and chairs across the hall, with the chairs surely filling up with architects, educators, designers and creative people of various industries.
This wasn’t your run-of-the-mill event. Dear Designer was an attempt to capture the voices of designers to co-develop the Design Master Plan 2035. Through emerging themes surfaced through past engagements, the event connected fellow practitioners and advocates to help shape strategies that reflect the hopes and needs of the design community of Singapore. A total of approximately 600 designers attended to speak up, making the session a resounding success.
Why national design matters
How could something like this be orchestrated? To amount to the logistics, finances and preparation for an industry-wide practice, a mandate must be present.
Established in 2003 as the national agency to promote design, the DesignSingapore Council is part of Singapore’s economic development board (EDB), which is poised to enhance Singapore’s value proposition and contribute to its economic growth and progress as one of the country’s strategies. Their mission is to promote design to people and for designers to participate in the national agenda.
Singapore is not alone in this endeavour. Countries such as the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, and Denmark are just a few that promote the value of design at a national level. In fact, it was only days ago that the United States joined the foray by appointing Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia as the chief design officer to the new national design studio. Although his immediate task is to update the government’s design language to be both usable and beautiful, America by Design is the broader initiative to improve the experiences for Americans.
From products to policies
The roads that we drive, the water that we drink and the buildings that we live and work in are all derived from human interventions known as public policies, which, put simply, are the attempts to solve people’s problems. It is the course of action taken by governments in response to issues that threaten or meddle with the interests of a nation.
As designers, we often deal with experiences at the product level. Services take our design a notch higher, where we now have to consider the interactions of multiple touchpoints, as well as non-digital cues such as physical or operational elements. However, a policy is when the designer considers the interconnectivity of multiple services and collaborators being implemented as a system.
This is not different from my previous article calling for human system designers, where designers negotiate with other humans in an ecosystem to calibrate new systems. The difference, however, between a policymaker and a human system designer lies in the emphasis of values and methods.
Human Systems Designer in action
Instead of looking at traditional macroeconomic measures like gross domestic product (GDP) or employment rates, human system designers consider more aspirational metrics like health, happiness, togetherness, fairness and planetary wellbeing. The narratives and stories are complementary to the data they collect and reflect on a dashboard, while creating new interventions to nudge new behaviours for positive change.
Instead of mandating an executive order based on the ideas of a few, human system designers become facilitators by hearing the voices of the community and working at the local level.
Instead of rolling out large short-term initiatives that require extreme resources and effort, human system designers work in small, good-enough steps, whereby each step validates and accumulates to an overarching strategy across a longer period of time. Like a web of relationships, these steps are shared among various actors in incremental agility. Designers, in this case, act as the orchestra conductor, keeping everyone in check with the mission while occasionally inspecting the value it generates with the end users.
The Dear Designer event was one such live example of this participatory approach, giving the community a role in shaping the 2035 masterplan.
The case for a design minister
Back in the convention hall, someone from the crowd suggested for Singapore to have a design minister. Clapping shortly followed, as the designers in the room unanimously agreed to this point. Let me remind everyone that this is actually not a far-fetched idea, as we have seen unconventional roles like the minister of happiness being officiated in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) or the minister of loneliness role at one point with the United Kingdom and Japan.
A design minister would represent design from a nation’s perspective. He or she would work with other design leaders, both private and public, on common themes around human needs and environmental issues. He or she may promote design within their country but also take the capability globally, at intergovernmental associations across countries like ASEAN, BRICS, and possibly the UN. They are to uphold non-traditional metrics, maybe even turning them into new ones, like gross design product – how design contributes to economic activities, innovation and value creation.
Here are the words of the former prime minister of Singapore, Mr Lee Hsien Loong:
At the national level, design is similarly a core element of our nation-building. Singapore is a nation by design. Nothing we have today is natural or happened by itself. Somebody thought about it and made it happen. Not our economic growth, not our international standing, not our multiracial harmony, not even our nationhood. Nothing was by chance.
A call to designers
Our role as designers is ever more important, and when we have policies by our side, we can be an unstoppable force for good. Let’s raise our voices one at a time to fix problems worth solving for people and the planet.
References
Bansal, T., & Birkinshaw, J. (2025, September). Why You Need Systems Thinking Now. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2025/09/why-you-need-systems-thinking-now
Conrad, J. (2025, August 22). Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia Has a New Gig — in the White House. Inc. https://www.inc.com/jennifer-conrad/airbnbs-joe-gebbia-may-have-a-new-gig-in-the-white-house/91230393
Global-Is-Asian Staff. (2019, April 2). Deconstructing Public Policy: Why It Matters. Nus.edu.sg. https://lkyspp.nus.edu.sg/gia/article/deconstructing-public-policy-why-it-matters
Hsien Loong, L. (2018, April 5). pm lee hsien loong sutd ministerial forum. Prime Minister’s Office Singapore. https://www.pmo.gov.sg/Newsroom/pm-lee-hsien-loong-sutd-ministerial-forum
Norman, D. A. (2023). Design for a better world : meaningful, sustainable, humanity centered. The MIT Press.
Yeo, D. (2025, March 24). UX or PX? Why naming matters. Medium; UX Collective. https://uxdesign.cc/ux-or-px-why-naming-matters-5cf890f64a9a
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