USP alum Nur Safiah Alias (Communications and New Media + USP, Class of 2014) was part of the “Who Cares? Transforming the Caregiving Experience for Singaporeans” project that won Design of the Year at the 2018 President*s Design Award (P*DA). Held on 17 July at the Istana, the Award was jointly handed out by the Urban Redevelopment Authority and DesignSingapore Council.

This winning project was commissioned to a design company, fuelfor, by the National Council of Social Service (NCSS) to conduct a strategic design project to design a better caregiving experience for Singapore. Safiah was on the design team when she worked for fuelfor as a freelance publication writer.

She tells us about her involvement, “My job was to understand and translate the amazing work that the design research team has done, so as to communicate it to a wide set of audience. It had to convince policy makers that attention needed to be given to caregivers who have been neglected and it had to educate social service professionals about the value of design ethnography as a tool to understand what caregivers of their clients go through; and design thinking from the insights as a way to come up with solutions that would address their caregiving needs (even those unspoken). I was immersed in every part of what fuelfor and the client partner [NCSS] went through to really understand the groundbreaking work they were doing.”

On what inspired her design idea, she shares, “At that time, Beyonce just released an album and a music video along called Lemonade which was something like her autobiography. I paid to see the full video which was hosted exclusively on Tidal and got my inspiration for structuring the book...fuelfor and NCSS loved the idea too and the Insights section of the publication was presented according to the emotions which was very relatable for anyone reading it. After that, I worked via Skype with the book's designer in Barcelona and together we produced this amazing book.”

Interesting! We are proud to see our alums creating amazing work like this.

Learn more about the project here.