Long before she became the head of Singapore’s national agency for design, DesignSingapore Council's Dawn Lim already experienced the cost of bad design – during the two decades she spent as a caregiver to her late parents.
In a local hospital just last year, Lim had to collect a biopsy sample taken from her father.
A biopsy is a medical procedure where a tiny portion of body tissue is taken to be examined in a lab. It’s often used to check for diseases like cancer or better understand abnormal growths and conditions.
The process, in theory, sounded simple: Go to the clinic, get the forms signed by his doctor, then let the hospital take over.
In reality, the doctor told her to take the forms to the medical records office.
“I asked, ‘Well, why can’t you just send it over?’ To me, that was the logical assumption, as (the staff) should know the hospital better than me,” the 43-year-old recalled.
The response was clear: She’d requested for the biopsy, so she had to bring the forms to the office herself.
After a bout of “challenging” wayfinding through the hospital, she found the office in the basement – only to be asked which type of slide the biopsy sample should be placed on.
“I said, ‘I have no clue because the doctor ordered it, and it’s going to the lab for a test, right?’” Lim said.
“And the staff replied, ‘Yeah, but I need to know which slides you want.’”
Lim asked if they could call the clinic to check – and was told, again, that she had to make the call herself as the requester. But the hospital being a public one, the phone lines were near impossible to get through.
She had no choice but to choose a slide herself, picking from what made more sense.
She was also told to expect a call to “collect the slides” eventually. The biopsy sample, or body tissue, is placed on glass slides before being sent to a pathologist who examines the cells for diseases.
“So I asked, ‘Why am I collecting them? Shouldn’t they be sent to the lab?’ I also tried asking them to call the clinic instead. Both times, they told me: ‘You are the requester.’”
Now able to laugh about her situation, Lim told CNA Women: “And what was I supposed to do with the biopsy slides then? Put them in my fridge?”
Dawn Lim (centre, in pink) with her staff at Singapore's exhibition at Milan Design Week 2025, titled Future Impact 3: Design Nation. (Photo: Dawn Lim/DesignSingapore Council)
The executive director of DesignSingapore Council since May 2022, she now recognises the design-related pain points in her experience.
The agency is a subsidiary under the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), which is itself a statutory board under the Ministry of Trade and Industry.
DesignSingapore has what she calls both “social and economic mandates”. The first looks at the urban environment – how people live and interact in public and private spaces, how social organisation works, for instance.
The latter is about how design can make businesses more competitive and innovative.
Though Lim isn’t aware if the hospital’s process has changed since, she believes it was likely designed for “optimal efficiency” within the institution by allowing the requester, usually the patient or caregiver, to take full ownership of their request – but overlooked the very same patient or caregiver’s journey.
In the end, she got through to the clinic and they sorted it out. She didn’t have to collect the slides – but the experience stuck with her.
“Generally with sickness, it’s already a very stressful situation. To navigate an institution’s bureaucracy adds even more stress. I’m English-speaking so I can ask the right questions and try to manoeuvre around – but what if somebody else isn’t?” she said.
“That informed a lot of my personal conviction about why good design is so important to us as a society, especially with an increasingly ageing population.”
Good design targets decision making and removes “cognitive load”, Lim believes. It should make “everyday lived experiences” feel easy and seamless.
And perhaps it begins with first noticing what doesn’t work and why.
Bad design is “very easy to spot”, she said – such as in the inconvenience and frustration she suffered navigating a hospital’s system as her late father’s caregiver.
One of her pet peeves is locked wheelchair-accessible toilets in shopping malls. It’s a practice driven by a fear of misuse, which she understands, but it ends up excluding those who need it the most.
“If someone with incontinence cannot wait 10 minutes (for the mall’s staff to unlock the toilets), it becomes an embarrassing situation for them. It removes their dignity in a really challenging situation that they may face daily,” she said.
Another instance of lacking design is the bustling intersection of Orchard Road and Scotts Road, which she often frames in a thought experiment: How might an able-bodied person cross from Wheelock Place to Tang Plaza? And how would, say, a wheelchair user or a parent with a pram do the same?
An able-bodied person may take the escalator from the ground floor of Wheelock Place to its basement – it links to Orchard MRT station, which has an exit leading up to Tang Plaza.
For a wheelchair user or parent pushing a pram, however, “it’s not so straightforward”, she said. They may have difficulty even locating the lift in Wheelock Place to start.
“This is just a small example of how we don’t always realise many things that are in our everyday places and spaces are not fully inclusive or accessible.”
Immigration gantries in Changi Airport Terminal 3's arrival hall on Feb 13, 2025. Dawn Lim often highlights the airport's efficiency as an example of everyday good design. (File photo: CNA/Wallace Woon)
Good design, on the other hand, is often invisible “because you almost live through it smoothly”, Lim said. “We don’t always notice or appreciate it.”
The Parking.sg app – a “genius idea” – that allows drivers to pay for parking with a mobile device is her personal favourite.
“If I’m (held up), I don’t have to leave where I am to walk back to my car to put another coupon. I just go onto the app and extend (my parking duration),” she said. “It makes it easier for the user to get on with life.”
And she often points to Changi Airport’s unparalleled efficiency – the fact that you could spend less than 10 minutes from plane to cab – as a tangible example to educate others that good design is everywhere.
“Then, people get it. Raising awareness of our daily lived experience and how design shows up in the most innocuous ways tells a lot of the story itself,” she said.
A "digital twin" of Changi General Hospital's emergency department, showcased at Singapore's exhibition Future Impact 3: Design Nation at Milan Design Week 2025. (Photo: TC & Friends)
The "digital twin" of Changi General Hospital's emergency department, showcased at Singapore's exhibition Future Impact 3: Design Nation at Milan Design Week 2025, is a virtual replica of real-time operations. (Image: Farm, Vouse and Changi General Hospital)
More recently, Singaporean designers showcased a spectrum of possible everyday design applications at Milan Design Week in April from furniture to medical technology, she added.
A highlight was the “digital twin” – a virtual replica of a real-world entity – of Changi General Hospital’s (CGH) emergency department. It was designed by CGH and Singaporean companies, multi-disciplinary design agency Farm and cross-technology company Vouse, to enable the hospital to rethink operations and improve patient experience.
Through simulations, the hospital would be able to see how people move around, how staff make decisions and how to deploy resources, among other scenarios. This makes it easier to find better ways to deliver care.
“Many people have the misconception that design equates to nice things, but nice things also need to work nicely. You can have both – it is not mutually exclusive,” Lim said.
“Let Singapore surprise you. We have more to offer than you would expect.”
Unlike three of her four predecessors who were architects, and the fourth who worked briefly in a global design consultancy, Lim had no formal background in design.
What she had was over a decade of experience in EDB – DesignSingapore’s parent organisation and the lead government agency responsible for enhancing Singapore’s position as a global business centre.
Dawn Lim with Kintsugi 2.0 by Supermama, a project showcased at Singapore's exhibition at Milan Design Week 2025. (Photo: Dawn Lim/DesignSingapore Council)
While her role at DesignSingapore now requires her to dive deep into design knowledge, her prior stint at EDB taught her complementary skills by thinking about innovation “very broadly”.
This included how design was applied across research and development, product, and service areas among other functions.
Her scope at EDB, including overseeing the independent execution of the agency’s strategy and operations in Europe, taught to see the big picture to ensure Singapore was always “internationally competitive”.
“That mindset is probably something quite embedded that I took with me into this role: What is Singapore design’s competitive edge in the world? And what can we stand out for?” she said.
Putting Singapore design on the global stage, however, requires a fundamental mindset change involving creative confidence, competence and courage.
“Many people like to say Singaporeans are not creative … but we are very competent creatively. The fact that this country makes so many things work is creative,” Lim said.
Singaporeans do have “small ‘c’ creativity”, she added. “It’s actually there every day. You look at these ground-up initiatives like Repair Kopitiam.”
The community-driven programme encourages repair culture by getting people to first consider fixing their broken item before throwing it away.
As for “big ‘C’ creativity”, she pointed to the NEWater process, which recycles Singapore’s treated used water into ultra-clean, high-grade reclaimed water.
“So we have both ends of the spectrum of creativity. It’s not that we’re not creative, but we also must know how to recognise it exists in many different forms.”
Part of Singapore's showcase Future Impact 3: Design Nation at Milan Design Week 2025. (Photo: TC & Friends)
This starts with understanding what we mean when we talk about “creativity”, Lim noted.
On one hand, there is the “Silicon Valley type, where every day there’s a startup that’s invented and you hope that one of them becomes the next Facebook or Google”.
On the other, there is “creativity in terms of making changes to the everyday”, she added. “And I think there’s space for both.”
The issue is that Singaporeans often “don’t have enough courage to try”, she believes. “But the very definition of creativity means you must try and take risks. And when you don’t practise it, you cannot build confidence. Then it becomes a cycle.”
So she’s convinced the “crux of creativity” lies in not knowing the outcome but trying anyway – and knowing it is okay to get it wrong many times before finally getting it right.
Importantly, this mindset shift starts from as early as primary school. The organisation’s Learning By Design initiative brings together students, educators and sometimes parents to tackle a challenge within the school or wider community.
In 2023, St Joseph’s Institution students noticed “quite a lot of elderly men lounging by themselves alone at kopitiams (coffee shops)” in Toa Payoh, and set out to create a “community space” to address their social isolation.
As with any discipline, there are professional qualifications and training in design, but there’s also the aspect that’s about encouraging “a mindset of creative thinking that everybody can exercise”, Lim explained.
Dawn Lim interacting with Tapestree by Nazurah Rohayat, a project at Singapore's showcase Future Impact 3: Design Nation at Milan Design Week 2025. (Photo: Dawn Lim/DesignSingapore Council)
For when it works, good design makes all the difference. In healthcare, for example, it would involve training practitioners to deliver the human touch at critical points in the caregiver’s journey, she added, speaking from experience.
Eighteen months into her late father’s treatment, she was referred to a palliative care institution. The first thing the chief medical officer asked: “How are you doing as a caregiver?”
“Nobody in the entire journey of 18 months had ever asked how I – as the primary caregiver – was doing. And wow, that just changed the entire conversation,” she said.
“It wasn’t about providing information. It was just someone acknowledging, ‘Actually, it’s hard on you, we know. We’ll take care of you. We’ll take care of your father.’”
CNA Women is a section on CNA Lifestyle that seeks to inform, empower and inspire the modern woman. If you have women-related news, issues and ideas to share with us, email CNAWomen [at] mediacorp.com.sg.
Continue reading...
In a local hospital just last year, Lim had to collect a biopsy sample taken from her father.
A biopsy is a medical procedure where a tiny portion of body tissue is taken to be examined in a lab. It’s often used to check for diseases like cancer or better understand abnormal growths and conditions.
The process, in theory, sounded simple: Go to the clinic, get the forms signed by his doctor, then let the hospital take over.
In reality, the doctor told her to take the forms to the medical records office.
“I asked, ‘Well, why can’t you just send it over?’ To me, that was the logical assumption, as (the staff) should know the hospital better than me,” the 43-year-old recalled.
The response was clear: She’d requested for the biopsy, so she had to bring the forms to the office herself.
After a bout of “challenging” wayfinding through the hospital, she found the office in the basement – only to be asked which type of slide the biopsy sample should be placed on.
“I said, ‘I have no clue because the doctor ordered it, and it’s going to the lab for a test, right?’” Lim said.
“And the staff replied, ‘Yeah, but I need to know which slides you want.’”
Lim asked if they could call the clinic to check – and was told, again, that she had to make the call herself as the requester. But the hospital being a public one, the phone lines were near impossible to get through.
She had no choice but to choose a slide herself, picking from what made more sense.
She was also told to expect a call to “collect the slides” eventually. The biopsy sample, or body tissue, is placed on glass slides before being sent to a pathologist who examines the cells for diseases.
“So I asked, ‘Why am I collecting them? Shouldn’t they be sent to the lab?’ I also tried asking them to call the clinic instead. Both times, they told me: ‘You are the requester.’”
Now able to laugh about her situation, Lim told CNA Women: “And what was I supposed to do with the biopsy slides then? Put them in my fridge?”
Dawn Lim (centre, in pink) with her staff at Singapore's exhibition at Milan Design Week 2025, titled Future Impact 3: Design Nation. (Photo: Dawn Lim/DesignSingapore Council)
The executive director of DesignSingapore Council since May 2022, she now recognises the design-related pain points in her experience.
The agency is a subsidiary under the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), which is itself a statutory board under the Ministry of Trade and Industry.
DesignSingapore has what she calls both “social and economic mandates”. The first looks at the urban environment – how people live and interact in public and private spaces, how social organisation works, for instance.
The latter is about how design can make businesses more competitive and innovative.
Though Lim isn’t aware if the hospital’s process has changed since, she believes it was likely designed for “optimal efficiency” within the institution by allowing the requester, usually the patient or caregiver, to take full ownership of their request – but overlooked the very same patient or caregiver’s journey.
In the end, she got through to the clinic and they sorted it out. She didn’t have to collect the slides – but the experience stuck with her.
“Generally with sickness, it’s already a very stressful situation. To navigate an institution’s bureaucracy adds even more stress. I’m English-speaking so I can ask the right questions and try to manoeuvre around – but what if somebody else isn’t?” she said.
“That informed a lot of my personal conviction about why good design is so important to us as a society, especially with an increasingly ageing population.”
THE GOOD AND BAD OF EVERYDAY DESIGN
Good design targets decision making and removes “cognitive load”, Lim believes. It should make “everyday lived experiences” feel easy and seamless.
And perhaps it begins with first noticing what doesn’t work and why.
Bad design is “very easy to spot”, she said – such as in the inconvenience and frustration she suffered navigating a hospital’s system as her late father’s caregiver.
One of her pet peeves is locked wheelchair-accessible toilets in shopping malls. It’s a practice driven by a fear of misuse, which she understands, but it ends up excluding those who need it the most.
“If someone with incontinence cannot wait 10 minutes (for the mall’s staff to unlock the toilets), it becomes an embarrassing situation for them. It removes their dignity in a really challenging situation that they may face daily,” she said.
Another instance of lacking design is the bustling intersection of Orchard Road and Scotts Road, which she often frames in a thought experiment: How might an able-bodied person cross from Wheelock Place to Tang Plaza? And how would, say, a wheelchair user or a parent with a pram do the same?
An able-bodied person may take the escalator from the ground floor of Wheelock Place to its basement – it links to Orchard MRT station, which has an exit leading up to Tang Plaza.
For a wheelchair user or parent pushing a pram, however, “it’s not so straightforward”, she said. They may have difficulty even locating the lift in Wheelock Place to start.
“This is just a small example of how we don’t always realise many things that are in our everyday places and spaces are not fully inclusive or accessible.”
Immigration gantries in Changi Airport Terminal 3's arrival hall on Feb 13, 2025. Dawn Lim often highlights the airport's efficiency as an example of everyday good design. (File photo: CNA/Wallace Woon)
Good design, on the other hand, is often invisible “because you almost live through it smoothly”, Lim said. “We don’t always notice or appreciate it.”
The Parking.sg app – a “genius idea” – that allows drivers to pay for parking with a mobile device is her personal favourite.
“If I’m (held up), I don’t have to leave where I am to walk back to my car to put another coupon. I just go onto the app and extend (my parking duration),” she said. “It makes it easier for the user to get on with life.”
And she often points to Changi Airport’s unparalleled efficiency – the fact that you could spend less than 10 minutes from plane to cab – as a tangible example to educate others that good design is everywhere.
“Then, people get it. Raising awareness of our daily lived experience and how design shows up in the most innocuous ways tells a lot of the story itself,” she said.
A "digital twin" of Changi General Hospital's emergency department, showcased at Singapore's exhibition Future Impact 3: Design Nation at Milan Design Week 2025. (Photo: TC & Friends)
The "digital twin" of Changi General Hospital's emergency department, showcased at Singapore's exhibition Future Impact 3: Design Nation at Milan Design Week 2025, is a virtual replica of real-time operations. (Image: Farm, Vouse and Changi General Hospital)
More recently, Singaporean designers showcased a spectrum of possible everyday design applications at Milan Design Week in April from furniture to medical technology, she added.
A highlight was the “digital twin” – a virtual replica of a real-world entity – of Changi General Hospital’s (CGH) emergency department. It was designed by CGH and Singaporean companies, multi-disciplinary design agency Farm and cross-technology company Vouse, to enable the hospital to rethink operations and improve patient experience.
Through simulations, the hospital would be able to see how people move around, how staff make decisions and how to deploy resources, among other scenarios. This makes it easier to find better ways to deliver care.
“Many people have the misconception that design equates to nice things, but nice things also need to work nicely. You can have both – it is not mutually exclusive,” Lim said.
“Let Singapore surprise you. We have more to offer than you would expect.”
TAKING SINGAPORE DESIGN GLOBAL
Unlike three of her four predecessors who were architects, and the fourth who worked briefly in a global design consultancy, Lim had no formal background in design.
What she had was over a decade of experience in EDB – DesignSingapore’s parent organisation and the lead government agency responsible for enhancing Singapore’s position as a global business centre.
Dawn Lim with Kintsugi 2.0 by Supermama, a project showcased at Singapore's exhibition at Milan Design Week 2025. (Photo: Dawn Lim/DesignSingapore Council)
While her role at DesignSingapore now requires her to dive deep into design knowledge, her prior stint at EDB taught her complementary skills by thinking about innovation “very broadly”.
This included how design was applied across research and development, product, and service areas among other functions.
Her scope at EDB, including overseeing the independent execution of the agency’s strategy and operations in Europe, taught to see the big picture to ensure Singapore was always “internationally competitive”.
“That mindset is probably something quite embedded that I took with me into this role: What is Singapore design’s competitive edge in the world? And what can we stand out for?” she said.
FINDING THE COURAGE TO BE CREATIVE
Putting Singapore design on the global stage, however, requires a fundamental mindset change involving creative confidence, competence and courage.
“Many people like to say Singaporeans are not creative … but we are very competent creatively. The fact that this country makes so many things work is creative,” Lim said.
Singaporeans do have “small ‘c’ creativity”, she added. “It’s actually there every day. You look at these ground-up initiatives like Repair Kopitiam.”
The community-driven programme encourages repair culture by getting people to first consider fixing their broken item before throwing it away.
As for “big ‘C’ creativity”, she pointed to the NEWater process, which recycles Singapore’s treated used water into ultra-clean, high-grade reclaimed water.
“So we have both ends of the spectrum of creativity. It’s not that we’re not creative, but we also must know how to recognise it exists in many different forms.”
Part of Singapore's showcase Future Impact 3: Design Nation at Milan Design Week 2025. (Photo: TC & Friends)
This starts with understanding what we mean when we talk about “creativity”, Lim noted.
On one hand, there is the “Silicon Valley type, where every day there’s a startup that’s invented and you hope that one of them becomes the next Facebook or Google”.
On the other, there is “creativity in terms of making changes to the everyday”, she added. “And I think there’s space for both.”
The issue is that Singaporeans often “don’t have enough courage to try”, she believes. “But the very definition of creativity means you must try and take risks. And when you don’t practise it, you cannot build confidence. Then it becomes a cycle.”
So she’s convinced the “crux of creativity” lies in not knowing the outcome but trying anyway – and knowing it is okay to get it wrong many times before finally getting it right.
Importantly, this mindset shift starts from as early as primary school. The organisation’s Learning By Design initiative brings together students, educators and sometimes parents to tackle a challenge within the school or wider community.
In 2023, St Joseph’s Institution students noticed “quite a lot of elderly men lounging by themselves alone at kopitiams (coffee shops)” in Toa Payoh, and set out to create a “community space” to address their social isolation.
As with any discipline, there are professional qualifications and training in design, but there’s also the aspect that’s about encouraging “a mindset of creative thinking that everybody can exercise”, Lim explained.
Dawn Lim interacting with Tapestree by Nazurah Rohayat, a project at Singapore's showcase Future Impact 3: Design Nation at Milan Design Week 2025. (Photo: Dawn Lim/DesignSingapore Council)
For when it works, good design makes all the difference. In healthcare, for example, it would involve training practitioners to deliver the human touch at critical points in the caregiver’s journey, she added, speaking from experience.
Eighteen months into her late father’s treatment, she was referred to a palliative care institution. The first thing the chief medical officer asked: “How are you doing as a caregiver?”
“Nobody in the entire journey of 18 months had ever asked how I – as the primary caregiver – was doing. And wow, that just changed the entire conversation,” she said.
“It wasn’t about providing information. It was just someone acknowledging, ‘Actually, it’s hard on you, we know. We’ll take care of you. We’ll take care of your father.’”
CNA Women is a section on CNA Lifestyle that seeks to inform, empower and inspire the modern woman. If you have women-related news, issues and ideas to share with us, email CNAWomen [at] mediacorp.com.sg.
Continue reading...