Name: Brainstorm Design 2019: Designing Singapore: Strategy, Policy, and Technology
Uploaded: 2019-03-21
Duration: 19 min 55 s
Description: In 50 years, Singapore has transformed from mudflats to a metropolis. Rapid technological disruption, increasing fiscal trade-offs and the challenging geopolitical climate will make the next phase of nation-building more complex.

Jacqueline and I have a pretty similar background in policy and economics and it's interesting that she took on a role that took her into technology and also for this push towards a Smart Nation. That's pretty much where our similarities end, because she went into government, I went into journalism. She is a Star Wars fan, I'm a Trekkie. You know where this conversation goes. So I'm gonna kick it off by asking a simple question. That I know that probably everyone wants to understand. And I'm going to bring up a slide that you sent across for us. It's an economy and in a position where The world is challenging. There are lots of uncertainties. Economic growth across the board for Singapore is still strong, but there are risks to the downside. When you look at the way you're looking at design and technology and implementation going down the road How are you looking at all of these scenarios that are playing out? Thank you very much [ UNKNOWN ]. I really thank the organizers for sort of adding a little bit of a different kind of element to this conference beyond what you see as design for products. Or even design for services, and that is design for policy, design for strategy, and design for technology in a public policy context. I think, and that's the reason why I put up these slides, and I think that for a lot of countries and governments, it takes a long time to make a shift. It takes a long time to think about how to design for the future. The first picture that we have on the left, Houston, we have a problem, is something that was tweeted recently by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. And this was what basically happened to them after they came back from the moon. It's a customs declaration form. So basically they came back to Earth, went to Hawaii, and they said, well, you've come back to America [ LAUGH ]. Is there anything you'd like to declare? And it kinda indicates, in many ways, how a lot of governments do tend to not be in time for the future. And one of the roles of the Saint Paul government is also to look at what are the black swans, what are the unexpected, see around the corner events that might help to enable us to deal with challenges and take advantage of opportunities. Thins like SARS in 2003 would be an example of that. And also to actually telescope into the future to take a look at what's happening not just now but to 10 years down the road 20 years down the road and across the hall of the Singapore government, foresight has become an important part of how we achieve design those strategies. So I'm going to try and pull up the second slide and I think that brings up the issue of looking at how you see the future. When you design these and you're looking at the building scenarios, which are quite unpredictable. Let's put it frankly. How many years out do you plan, and how do you look at these elements to make sure that the city Continues to function no matter what uncertainty [ UNKNOWN ] at it. It's not an easy job, and I think it takes an entire public service to be able to achieve that in unison and in alignment. What I can say is that in the process of trying to design a city, or an economy or Kind of the future of how we think that a little island can progress. It's helpful to think of it in terms of foresight, hindsight and insight. The foresight work that is done both by my office as well as by foresight units throughout the whole of government, look at things like national scenarios. They look at emerging strategic issues like For example, AI ethics or human augmentation, or big geopolitical shifts but they also look back into the past. What worked, what didn't work. How that can inform better. How we design in future from things that might not have succeeded in the past. And then finally kinda getting that insight together and pushing that into any form of national strategy. I think that's an interesting point, right? So when you look at designing and the foresight, what hasn't worked in the past that you think you've- [ LAUGH ] Actually been able to address or are still wanting to address? I think that what we need to do is to constantly look at not just a lot about policies are quiet successful, that's how we got to, I suppose, sort of where we are today but in the sits of that are also possible. Things that we need to look at that are not so suitable for the future. I'll give you an example of an announcement that was made yesterday by our education minister. We had a policy that was actually pretty successful in achieving what it wanted to achieve for 40 years, and the policy was known as streaming. That is to put students into different you know streams according to their ability to learn and like how fast they learned. 40 years later, we found that that certainly achieved what it was supposed to do, which was to reduce attrition rates by having people learn at the right speed for them. Unfortunately, it was causing issues with social mixing, and with morale and motivation for students who were put in some of the streams. So a decision was taken to actually move to something called subject- based banding, which was a far more personalized education approach. Where people could sort of take classes at different levels. And that's an interesting approach to designing a policy that works for today and tomorrow. And you mentioned looking past as well. And that brings up a critical point that the silver economy in this country is going to triple in size. You're looking at a pioneer generation that has to be taken care of. It's a crisis that we have to deal with in Europe as well, to quite an extent. How do you design around it and how much of a role does technology end up playing within that space? Wanna bring that slide up- That's really interesting, I think one of the examples, we wanted to actually give policy design was actually one of the ways in which we were addressing what was essentially a very fast aging population in Singapore. And also needing to acknowledge the contributions of a group of Singaporeans who had been there When we had just achieved independence, they were around 16 years and above at the time of achieving independence at 1965. These were the people who were first national service men, our first soldiers, the bedrock of our manufacturing industry when we first started. They were the first. At everything and because they were the first they also didn't have the opportunity to get the kind of education that their children later have. They didn't have the opportunity to get the kind of incomes that their children later had. As a result, in terms of their retirements and social security and also their healthcare needs, they were one step behind. They were far less in a position to take care of themselves. So the question was how do you design something particularly to meet the needs of these users? Then you have to ask yourself who really are the users? In this case the users were the pioneer generation themselves and their own particular situation. Also, their children who basically thought they had to pay for the health care needs of their parents And this was causing them a lot of stress. And generally, the needs of society, to know that we are actually acknowledging contributions. How do you design for that age group, when it comes to implementing a smart solution for them? That's not easy. I know you have great examples in Estonia and in other countries in that region. What did you do so different that hadn't been done elsewhere, and do you think it's a complete success, or do you think that it's an iteration, it's evolving? So I think for the Pioneer Generation Package, it was mainly a financial package, to give them healthcare assurance. The innovation there was also how we reached out to the seniors, So we realized that you know, for them, an entirely digital kind of interface was not gonna work we're not gonna send to their smartphones and at that says, these are your benefits. So we actually sent out what we call Silva generation ambassadors, or then pilot generation and messages. We actually use the young old to reach out to the older, old. And so you know these would be people in their fifties for example. And they actually went out house to house to tell them about the benefits that they would receive. But the young old would get ipads and other devices to be able to record and to get a full understanding of what that household would receive and to take down all their concerns. And then all of that would be fed back into a database. So it was actually an interesting kind of mixture of mediums. The face to face, the high touch, then there was the high tech. Then there was the data intensity. And then finally there was a media push. That again was designed for this group. And that was in dialect, Cantonese, [ UNKNOWN ]. And that was a really big shift, because before that, the use of dialects in Singapore had been discouraged for many, many years, cuz we wanted everyone to speak, say, Mandarin. And some majority Chinese population. So, in this case we said the user is the most important to design for us. So, the [ INAUDIBLE ] materials were all these dialect videos and things like that. That human element seems to be very much part of smart city planning in many ways. Another example that you highlighted was something that became a bit of a YouTube sensation. It's a landfill that doesn't look anything like a landfill. Tell us how that idea came about and how exactly you thought about putting this together and for it to become now a tourist destination. Yeah, I think that's really speaks to, if you are in public policy, what is design to you? It is about solution seeking. It's fundamentally looking at a problem, defining it, finding a solution, and designing that solution to meet the needs. And in this case You know, we've had typical landfills for a long time in Singapore in the 70s 80s these were you know, what we had only sometime in the 80s that we decide that soup was a really small island. We don't have space for landfills and we started to build what we call Waste incineration plants. So we would take the all that waste. And we would burn it. Yeah. And in the process of burning the waste, the amount of waste that you have shrinks by 90 %, which is a good thing. At the same time you create energy for a country that doesn't have many other energy sources. So it was great. We changed waste to energy. Then we had less waste, and we had to put it somewhere. And at that time we had these a few islands there and something called Pulau Semakau, about 5km south from the coast of Singapore. And a decision was taken to actually convert this, put a non permeable membrane around it and marine clay. And to put all the ways, all the ashes into this place, into this sort of [ UNKNOWN ] you can see in the before picture, and by doing so we would create a new [ UNKNOWN ]. So that's great because Singapore need a land, Singapore need electricity, Singapore did not need more waste. And in the end it actually works out quite well in terms of creating sort of new space. What was the biggest hurdle in that one to get everyone to look at that design and say that works? Because sometimes getting people who are not thinkers in terms of creatively looking at that and saying that's an option What was the biggest hurdle there, you think? I think that, like for any of these new projects, feasibility would have to be something that you think about. And I think that the ambitions that you have initially can, it's okay for those ambitions to be more limited. So Marco does a lot more things now than it was envisioned at first, which was just to be a landfill for ash. It actually is a marine sanctuary, it's got bird life, people picnic there. We have a baramundi farm that grows fish fry on Samakau now as well. And exports it internationally. None of these things were envisaged, when the idea first came, it had one purpose. So it's all about designing the solution that sort of aligns all the needs together. And then after that, once it gets going it takes on a life of it's own. And that brings policy into implementation as well and that's something that you did with the National Identity Scheme as well. Talk us through the technology that goes into doing something like that and then tying it back to ensuring that there's growth in the nation. When you're aiming for a smart nation. So this is an interesting project, because I would say that not many countries have indentities, or digital identities, want to do actually a little bit more with them. A basis sort of for communcations and comerse and interactive transations and andy digital economy is identitiy. The ability to verify and authenticate that it is you and it is your purchase and it's your opinion and its your transaction. And so the National Digital Identity Project's kind of interesting, because it creates a unique digital identity for every Singaporean. So that's a design element in itself. But we wanted to design it in a way that would form a platform for businesses as well as the government to rely on it to make transactions. So to do that you had to make it secure, so to stop PKI. We had to make it usable, so it's actually not biometric. And it had to be a secure platform that, you know, using APIs private enterprises could then onboard so at the moment at my understanding is that Scott about a 107 government services using this and in doing so it means no more forms filling. The citizens do not have to fill out forms anymore. That's cut down 80 % of transaction time. But it also has 120 private sector services that ride on this including almost all the banks. Property houses, insurance And it's used by a lot of other organizations for verification and knowing their customer. Do you sometimes feel that maybe you're at a disadvantage where some of this is so controlled by the government that private sector might feel slightly pushed out. And then convincing citizens to share their data is always an issue, especially if it's in the hands of government. Trust comes into it. We've talked a lot about trust and design. Where do you think that bridge can be made and that challenge can be addressed? Because you're facing that now. Yeah, so actually, trust is a huge thing if you design anything. For you know so especially financial context or government context. In Singapore I would say that I think the trust in government is a bit higher than there are a few other countries that have in the world trust and the I think there was some, there Surveys that we had that showed that actually citizens expect that we had all the data already. And so why were we asking again and again since you already know? Okay so that was the first step. Then we knew that the private sector actually didn't have all of this data so we weren't crowding anyone else out. There was no way anyone else was gonna collect it [ LAUGH ] To the extent that we were. And in fact, we would have been accused of hoarding the data if we had just not done anything about it to make it an open platform. So what we do was to say, look, if you're a citizen and you want to set up a credit card, and you don't want to have to tell your bank all about yourself, write up a form. And you just use the national digital identity, you click, then the bank just says Are you okay that I use the national digital identity, my info, to access the things I need to access to be able to give you a credit card? You have to say okay. The power is in the hand of the citizen. They have to say okay, and then the rest happens. Well, I know we're running out of time, so in a quick ten second Is there anything that you see as a question that you constantly ask yourself? Why do we do it that way? Why do we change things the way we do it? Is there an example of that? Well, there's just one example, and I did have a slide on this one. Well, you have ten seconds. For many years, we used This interesting thing called Car Parking Coupons, the little paper coupons. For those of you who are not from Singapore, those are the things in the bottom left. Actually, this is already an advancement, many countries have meters which actually form a large chunk of street furniture These car parking meters. But we had these coupons which were also a bit troublesome in terms of enforcement. In terms of having to buy them and leaving the little stubs everywhere. And we converted that into an app that basically looked at wherever you were and then allowed you to pay wherever you were or for whomever you wanted. For as long as you wanted, and then to get a refund if you came back early. And that was incredibly simple, I think to actually do, but the designer limits were very strong. For example, we decided to put it on the public cloud, and but to do that we had to say the key design element was that we had to say, we did not care Who you paid for. your identity was irrelevant to us. You chose to pay for any car in the street and once you chose to pay for like once a design decision is taken. Then you can pay for any car industry you can make this thing cheap. You can make this thing easy to access. You can put it on the public Cloud. And the rest, it follows. I think that's what I've always found. When we talk about smart cities. Sometimes the most ingenious things are the simplest things that we ask the question, why do we do it like that? Jaqueline, thank you very much for your time, and please give her a round of applause for all that she's trying to do. [ APPLAUSE ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Brainstorm Design 2019: Designing Singapore: Strategy, Policy, and Technology

Design

In 50 years, Singapore has transformed from mudflats to a metropolis. Rapid technological disruption, increasing fiscal trade-offs and the challenging geopolitical climate will make the next phase of nation-building more complex.