Event Details
Developed for Singapore Design Week 2025, the project comprised an exhibition, panel, and participatory workshop curated by Dr Regine Abos with Dr Nicola St John, Alan Fong, Mark de Winne, and Kristen Mah. Drawing on Fong’s archival analysis of state artefacts alongside student works from the RMIT–SIM Communication Design program, the events reframe national identity as a negotiated, living process. Through mapping, collage, and speculative remixing of national symbols, participants articulated belonging beyond official narratives.
Situated within communication design and cultural studies, Nation by Design: Reimagining Singaporean Identity examines how visual communication mediates the relationship between institutional nation-building narratives and lived experiences of belonging. Drawing from Skaggs (2017) and Kress and van Leeuwen (2005), the research engages design semiotics, national branding, and postcolonial identity formation, responding to scholarship on design’s civic agency (Tonkinwise, 2019) and Singaporean discourses of design and citizenship (Koh, 2021).
The project advances new thinking on communication design as a civic medium, contributing to discourses on pluriversal design, civic imagination, and visual nationhood. Selected through a competitive process led by Design Council Singapore, Singapore Science Park, and OuterEdit, it featured at Singapore Design Week, with coverage in The Japan Times and a forthcoming panel transcript in the RMIT Design Archives Journal.
Event Participants
Nicola St John
Melbourne
Nicola St John is a settler Australian co-designer, design historian, and lecturer at RMIT University. Her practice is concerned with the promotion of respectful, responsible, and relational ways of designing. Her multi-award winning co-design work has led to the development of Australia’s only First Nations-led illustration agency – Solid Lines, a national podcast series around respectful collaboration, and strategies for design industries to incorporate diverse knowledges and infrastructures within commercial practice. Her design history and education practice focuses on reimaging Australian design away from settler narratives, towards acknowledging rich and diverse histories and knowledges.
Regine Abos
Melbourne, Australia
Dr Regine Abos is a Cebu-born, Naarm/Melbourne-based designer, educator and researcher, and Lecturer in RMIT University’s School of Design. An award-winning designer recognised by the Good Design Awards and Australian Book Designers Association (ABDA) Awards, she founded Studio Regina, a practice spanning publication design, information visualisation and participatory research. Her research explores how vernacular, analogue and participatory data visualisation can make complex issues tangible and support everyday behaviour change. Grounded in socially responsible and transition design, her work engages with situated knowledge, pluriversal perspectives and relationships between people, place and ecology, fostering critical reflection and more regenerative futures.