Singapore’s Milan Design Week 2025 showcase bridges past, present and future

Set inside a centuries-old church in Milan, Future Impact 3: DESIGN NATION traced six decades of Singaporean design, from cultural icons and everyday ephemera to future-facing provocations.

In the middle of Milan’s Cinque Vie district, past the glossy showrooms and Aperol-fuelled launches, sat one of the most powerful and quietly confident exhibitions at this year’s Milan Design Week. Held in the Chiesa di San Bernardino alle Monache, a 13th-century church turned contemplative design space, Future Impact 3: DESIGN NATION offered a pause from the overwhelming volume of furniture and brand activations.

The exhibition, curated by Tony Chambers, Maria Cristina Didero, and Singaporean designer Hunn Wai, marked 60 years since Singapore gained independence. It invited visitors on a journey through the nation’s design history, from nostalgic cultural emblems to present-day innovations and student-led visions of the future.

Set across three distinct zones inside the nave, the show told its story in spatial terms, too. To the right, design’s role in Singapore’s past; at the centre were contemporary works from eight of the country’s leading creatives, and to the left, some speculative ideas from the next generation. It was a chronological walk through an identity forged by design, rich with intention and heart.

Little island of brave ideas

The first section, titled Little Island of Brave Ideas, served as a loving archive of everyday objects that have shaped Singapore’s collective consciousness.

Take the Singapore Airlines kebaya, designed in 1974 by Parisian couturier Pierre Balmain. With its batik-inspired pattern, the uniform isn’t just recognisable; it’s iconic, a symbol of elegance and hospitality that’s travelled the world. Here, it stood as an early example of national branding done with grace and intention.

Equally emblematic was the Courtesy Campaign, a 1979 initiative aimed at fostering social harmony in Singapore’s densely populated urban environment. “Courtesy is our way of life” wasn’t just a tagline; it was an ethos engineered through civic messaging and public design.

Later down the line, humour met innovation with NEWBrew, a sustainable beer made using NEWater, which is Singapore’s high-grade recycled water. Originally launched in 2018, the project flips scarcity into opportunity, brewing climate-conscious craft beer from one of the planet’s most undervalued resources.

Of course, there were the hawker plates—those melamine icons of Singapore’s culinary culture. Colour-coded by cuisine and rooted in generational memory, they demonstrated how even a simple food plate can hold deep social and cultural meaning. “As standardised tableware replaces these plates, their visual legacy endures,” the exhibition noted. “A testament to how design, even in its most everyday form, preserves the vibrant, communal spirit of hawker dining.”

Present day pioneers

In the heart of the church, the exhibition shifted to the present, showcasing eight diverse and richly considered design responses to today’s global challenges. These weren’t just objects; they were systems, provocations, and care-driven tools for living.

Among them was Fungariums in Space by Ng Sze Kiat (Bewilder), which explored fungi as both form and function. These stainless steel structures support the growth of medicinal Ganoderma mushrooms at home, marrying ancient wisdom with biotech aesthetics. The work “presents innovation at the forefront of health and wellness,” blending “care and wellbeing with solutions rooted in ancient wellness rituals.”

Sustainability also took centre stage in Wei Xiang’s Knots Stool, a deceptively simple piece of furniture made by knotting old curtains or blankets over a light frame. No tools and no complex technical skills are required to make this piece of furniture—it’s more of an elegant invitation to reimagine waste.

Supermama’s Kintsugi 2.0 reinterpreted the Japanese art of ceramic repair, mending broken vessels and reconstructing missing fragments using gold-plated 3D-printed resin. Blending sustainability, craftsmanship, and technology, it asked us to rethink what it means to restore, preserve, and remember.

Then came the deeply considered Wishbone Bag by Claudia Poh (Wearable), a sleek modular bag system designed for accessibility and one-handed use. Poh’s work embodies inclusive design in the purest sense, proving that fashion doesn’t need to compromise on function or style.

Elsewhere, Sacha Leong (Nice Projects) responded to urban overcrowding with the Oku Screen, a beautiful spatial divider made in collaboration with Indonesian artisans. Olivia Lee’s Matahari reimagined solar cooking with layered terracotta forms. And Randy Yeo’s Modular explored Singapore’s graphic design heritage through sculptural typography made from recycled paper.

Together, these works felt timely and timeless, anchored in local culture yet globally resonant, merging sustainability, accessibility and aesthetic clarity with remarkable poise.

Virtuoso visionaries

Finally, the left wall of the church presented a speculative future – one shaped not by fear or dystopia but by curiosity, care, and surprisingly poetic optimism.

Among the standout pieces was TERA by Namjot Kaur, a self-watering planter for climbing plants made with a clever terracotta funnel system. A far cry from plastic pots and cumbersome supports, it “embodies Singapore’s inventive essence” and offers “a low-maintenance yet deeply rewarding approach to indoor gardening.”

pNEWmatics by Eian Siew was a showstopper in its own right, using inflatable air bladders to create structural joinery and a vacuum-powered brace to aid post-surgical healing. Meanwhile, environmental futures were explored in Celia by Kalinda Chen, a fungi-powered air purifier using oyster mushroom mycelium to absorb pollutants. A beautiful meeting of biophilic design and sustainability, it reframed purification as collaboration with nature, not dominance over it.

Tapestree by Nazurah Rohayat was another standout project that involved using AI to generate fabric patterns that merge cultural histories, redefining heritage as something dynamic and evolving. Rohayat explained how her project challenges the notion of static cultural narratives and instead celebrates multiculturalism as a dynamic force shaped by generations of exchange, adaptation, and reinvention. Her designs have even been worn by two government ministers to mark the Republic’s 59th birthday last year.

Another project called Refuse by Wong Eng Geng quite literally took to the bins. Serving as a “dumpster diving craft handbook,” it reframed waste as a resource, challenging throwaway culture with radical resourcefulness. Finally, CJ Tan’s Standard Singlish project gave Singapore’s distinctive Creole a typographic system of its own, playfully questioning who gets to decide what counts as a “proper” language.

These projects went beyond future-gazing and can best be described as thoughtful, grounded, and deeply human. As co-curator Wai put it, “Singapore is well-known for thriving through ingenuity and resourcefulness. Now, the future lies with the new generation of globally attuned, self-aware innovators who can continue this legacy.”

A nation by design

What made DESIGN NATION so moving wasn’t just the calibre of the work but the clarity of the vision. While many national showcases lean on curation or craft, this was about systems, infrastructure and identity. It showed how design has been quietly and intentionally woven into the fabric of Singapore’s story, from public housing and placemaking to accessibility and AI.

Crucially, the exhibition also asked what’s next – not with loud proclamations but with curiosity, care, and openness to reinvention.

At a week defined by maximalism and material excess (in most cases), Future Impact 3 offered a rare sense of meaning. In a church once filled with prayer, this exhibition was a quiet act of hope and proof that a nation’s future can be designed with thought, purpose, and people at its heart.