And some photos too. 

To express it in an understated sort of way, I’m currently juggling a lot of projects. New York, in an equally casual way, is a city with a lot of distractions.

My solution: skip town.
The destination: somewhere far away where I know no one, can work with my head down, and maybe hit up a beach or two.

Enter R. Brian Stone, my former professor in the Department of Design at The Ohio State University. I tell him that I’m looking to escape the city/country for a bit and ask whether he can reach out to someone in Rio de Janeiro for me. He’s just returned from teaching a semester in Asia and makes a convincing argument for Singapore that involves a widespread network of up-to-date computers (sorry Brazil), English as a national language, and connections to some of the foremost technology innovators in the world.

Fast forward several months and a good deal of email communication later (detailed below), I am invited to the National University of Singapore as a visiting scholar. They offer to provide me with a workspace in an office shared by graduate students and design researchers. One of the professors, Hans, also reaches out to me about conducting a project with his first-year industrial design students over the course of two 4-hour class sessions.

Teaching at NUS was one of the best experiences of my trip. The students were quick to catch on to the project I introduced to them—which was, I think, a new idea for industrial design students at their level and also fairly abstract on the whole. The projects they came up with were creative, funny, and thoughtful.

In my last week in Singapore, Hans invites me to join a critique with his third-year industrial design students. They are giving presentations as a dry-run leading up to their final presentations the following week. The assignment is to create a product that redefines the way we look at luxury.

Once again, the students impress. My favorite project was a circular light fixture that hangs above a dinner table, creating a 3G deadzone within that radius so that diners engage with each other rather than their social networking statuses during a meal. Luxury, distilled down to the simple idea of paying attention to one another. Not only are their products conceptually advanced and interesting, they are functional. Their graphic design skills are sharp too (thanks to Brian Stone, they tell me).

This is my last full day in Singapore, so after class the professors and I go out for dinner (barbecued string ray, prawns, chicken wings fried in shrimp paste, and a hot plate of beancurd) and drinks (pitchers of Heineken) on a simple concrete patio strung with lights. I’m with Hans and Winston—a professor at a neighboring university, also guest-critiquing. Jieyu—another NUS professor/all around awesome guy—joins us at the end of the meal. He’s late due to a misplaced phone (his fault) and some last minute changes in the dinner plan (our fault).

We meet up with some more friends at one of their old college hangouts to see a popular local band, The UnXpected—who they decided that I must see after learning that I follow a lot of live music in New York. It was a great last night in the city, with people who have grown up in Singapore and love it in a contagious way.

Daniel comes to greet me in the lobby. “Hi Channing. It’s good to see you” shaking my hand. “Its been a long time. 2 years? 3 years?” Daniel Alenquer is the design director of ASUS Singapore and an alumni of The Ohio State Design Department. He co-taught an interaction design class I took my senior year of college. Despite being in Singapore, he stayed up-to-date with our projects and even came to the States once during that time to present some of his projects from ASUS.

Daniel leads me into the ASUS design work space, through a frosted sliding glass door. He stops inside the door to remove his shoes and I do the same. We continue into the small space, a few people are working at computers, and he calls out introductions. “The rest of the team is brainstorming,” he says, gesturing to an out of the way conference room. We walk all the way through the office a wall of windows in the back, where we spend the next several hours talking about brainstorming, prototypes, patents—about making things in general and the process to do so.

I show him some things I’m working on. He shows me some of the things his team has been working on and modestly tells me about the patents they have recently won. He’s like a big kid, running around the office to grab different prototypes and presentations his team has made. I leave feeling inspired, purposeful, and more clear than I’ve ever felt about where my projects are headed.