To assist Singapore Customs in the migration from their previous intranet platform to Microsoft Sharepoint, The Idea Factory partnered with Hewlett-Packard to offer integrated change management services as well as user-centric design services.

Key Roles:

• Design of user-centric UX.
• Rapid prototyping and iteration of UI based on feedback from user studies.
• Design of visual identity of intranet.
• Production of supporting change-management materials, including EDMs.

Every year, Standard Chartered Bank brings its most promising international trainees from around the world together for a 5-day training program. Designed to challenge the participants’ analytical rigor, creativity, and business pitching skills, this experience is as demanding as it is prestigious.

The Idea Factory conducted segments of the training pertaining to team-based innovation, and facilitated the teams from ideation through prototyping.

During the preparation for the pitch, the trainees were pushed to venture beyond the powerpoint-and-excel-sheet format to sell their business ideas. The Idea Factory brought a team of on-location concept artists to create presentation boards overnight for the teams’ final presentation to the judging panel. Through consultation sessions, the trainees were guided through the process of translating their business ideas into meaningful and compelling art and copy to communicate the unique value their products offer to their consumers.

Key Roles:

• Conduct consultation sessions with each trainee team to develop and cull concepts for artwork and copy.
• Coordinate communication between team of concept artists and trainee teams.
• Oversee design and print production of concept boards.

Raffles Institution is one of the first Singaporean schools to dedicating core curriculum hours to Design Thinking. The school entrusted the task of designing a two-year syllabus, including supporting instructional publications for Secondary 1 and 2 students (12 to 14-year-olds), to The Idea Factory.

Working together with the team that developed the syllabus, I developed The Little Design Thinking Toolkit.

One consideration when the syllabus was designed was the student’s current workload. Being a premier educational institution, most students enrolled at Raffles Institution take on an exceptional degree of academic as well as co-curricular responsibilities. This course hence tries to minimize the amount of homework assigned.

To encourage retention of the course material without taxing the students’ already saturated schedules, we designed the the toolkit to encourage note-taking and idea journaling. The book, full of illustrations and stylized typefaces, resembles a notebook that has already been doodled in. Every other page contains a grid as well as lines, inviting students to jot down notes or visual ideas.

During development, the toolkit was prototyped and improved upon based on feedback from actual classroom observations.

Key Roles:

• Develop and edit course activity book content.
• Conduct semester-long classroom observations of response to prototypes.
• Visual design and production of activity book
• Oversee publication and production of activity book.

Commissioned by the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports, The Idea Factory designed the syllabus for the Work-Life Harmony module attended by students of Nanyang Polytechnic.

My role in this project was to design the customized materials that accompanied the course.

crUX is an initiative by Savant Degrees that brings together UX designers and web developers to learn, share, and apply their knowledge to build websites for a good cause.

In the session of crUX I participated in, we built a website for TWC2 (Transient Workers Count Too), an organization that is dedicated to assisting low-wage migrant workers when they are in difficult situations.

Visit TWC2′s Website

Key Contributions:

• Overnight delivery of preliminary GUI design.
• Suggestions to wireframe.

The Institute of Technical Education’s courses span a wide range of disciplines, including Business, Design and Info-comm Technology. As a school with a reputation for industry-relevance, it has recently added Design Thinking to it’s offering of electives and continuing education courses.

The Idea Factory was tasked to co-design the syllabus and course content, and produce the trainer’s and learner’s manuals that accompany the course.

Written not only to guide class activities and explain key Design Thinking concepts, but also serve as a practical reference for design tips and techniques, these manuals were very comprehensive in nature.

We hence made it our priority to fully exploit every opportunity to simplify. We represented complex concepts graphically as elegantly as possible and carefully designed a system that presented supplementary information where it was most relevant, without compromising the concise presentation of the core course material.

Read more about the Insitute of Technical Education