Finding Design Inspiration On the Other Side of the World

Recently, I spent a week in Singapore for my 9-5 job as a product manager for a financial services company. It was my first longest flight that I’ve taken (18 hours), my first time to Southeast Asia and of course, first time to Singapore. I have been traveling a lot in the last 8 years and one thing I always pay attention to when sightseeing is the architecture and design within that country.

Singapore is a wonderful combination of different cultures and along with that comes, design that is important to each culture. There are distinct neighborhoods like Chinatown, Little India and [muslim community neighborhood]. While each of those neighborhoods may seem completely unique, I found that there were common design features in each.

Plants!

Singapore was designed as a garden city and you can tell from the moment you exit the plane and walk through the Changi airport. Greenery is everywhere: outdoors lining the streets, medians and even on the outside of buildings. I also saw how many plants are indoors too within offices, hotels and restaurants.

Now that I’ve been surrounded by plants all week, my inner plant lady has been released. I can’t wait for this summer and planting my own.

Color

The millennial / neutral gray color scheme didn’t seem to take hold here and that’s ok. Every place I visited had a color scheme or pops of color in rooms. I think this is a great reminder to take design inspiration from other places outside of your home country. You may get great ideas from seeing how other peope live in their homes.

Sustainability

I noticed a lot of smart switches for lights, automatic temperature controls in thermostats. These aren’t new inventions but what was new to me was the prevalence. Office buildings and hotels all have these features and it doesn’t seem to be limited to newer buildings.

My hotel room bathroom had a separate faucet for filtered drinking water. This made refilling my re-usable water bottle even easier since I love free filtered water! It got me thinking about what a simple yet important feature this was to have in my room.

I highly recommend taking a trip if you have the budget and time to do so. Not only do I regularly find design inspiration at each new place but I also come back from that trip with a new insight on life.