Milan Design Week 2026: How Singapore’s 15 design projects in ‘Prototype Island’ are reimagining everyday life

Grouped under the themes Technological & Material Ecologies, Everyday Infrastructures, and Care Infrastructures & Cultural Continuities, the projects reveal a distinctly Singaporean approach to design: practical, socially minded and deeply engaged with real-world needs.

In Everyday Infrastructures, Zoey Chan’s Nido is a compact, modular insulin needle holder designed around the full injection cycle and built for one-handed use, inspired by her own experience with Type 1 diabetes.

Reynard Seah’s Noda draws on the turgidity of plant cells to create a silicone spherical core wrapped in 3D-printed loops, forming a flexible joint system for temporary shelters, play structures and transformable furniture.

Developed by A*Star Innovation Factory@SIMTech for Castomize, TessaCast reimagines the orthopaedic cast as a lightweight, breathable, waterproof and reusable 4D-printed alternative to conventional fibreglass.

In Technological & Material Ecologies, Scan to Play by the Interactive Materials Lab reframes the humble barcode as a design object, stripping it of its usual function to highlight it as a human gesture of exchange.

Carlos Bañón and Yiping Goh’s Formas.ai offers architects an AI-native platform that lets designers move from sketch to photorealistic visualisation while retaining full creative authorship.

ODD M.’s Fragility to Permanence turns eggshells and post-consumer waste into durable décor and home objects, exploring how delicate beginnings can lead to enduring form.

Jake Tan, Ezequiel Ignacio Rodríguez Chiacchio and Bao Songyu’s 1 Qubit is a quantum artwork installation that uses a custom-built classical computer, microcontrollers and smart polarising film to simulate a qubit collapsing when observed, letting audiences interact with quantum gates to shape its visual outcome.  In the map installation that greets visitors, 1 Qubit was represented by cat figurines, a knowing nod to Schrödinger's cat and the quantum themes at the heart of the work. Tan admits it's a little bit of clickbait. It worked.

Parable’s Iris is a handcrafted modular ceramic system made from local Singaporean clay, some preserved for over 40 years, designed to be repaired, expanded and reconfigured over time, treating furniture as an evolving relationship rather than a fixed object.

In Care Infrastructures & Cultural Continuities, weareSuper’s People of the World comprises 25 cobalt blue and white porcelain plates, each bearing a portrait-like face developed through co-design workshops with persons with disabilities.

Roger Ng Wei Lun’s Lustre Series reinterprets the traditional Peranakan tea table through UV-printed Dibond aluminium panels and pixel-based motifs, while his speculative Earth Deity Altar reimagines the Datuk Gong within Singapore’s future ecological and urban context.

In Threads of Becoming, Melvin Ong, Shervon Ong and artisan Andy Yeo, one of the few remaining practitioners of lacquer threading in Singapore, combine 3D-printed vessels with hand-applied qi xian diao, exploring how traditional knowledge can evolve through contemporary tools.

Also in this theme, Serina Lee’s Language System uses Chinese Clerical Script as structural logic, letting calligraphic strokes guide the design, pattern and materiality of garments while a bilingual system merging English letters and Chinese characters explores cross-cultural identity.

Aditi Neti’s Of Curves and Hands reinterprets the South Indian practice of kolam, a daily threshold drawing made with rice flour, through computational and mechanical systems, asking what is gained and what risks being lost when rituals rooted in touch are mediated by technology.

Tusitala, in collaboration with NAMIC Hub@SIT and iC2 PrepHouse, presents a 3D-printed tactile adaptation of the picture book Timmy & Tammy: At the Botanic Gardens, featuring a modular three-tier plate system that grows in textual complexity as a child’s Braille proficiency develops.

And Celeste Seah’s Rememo, developed with occupational therapy teams in Singapore nursing homes, uses generative AI images as gentle memory prompts for dementia reminiscence therapy when personal photographs are no longer available or no longer spark recognition.

Singapore has never been shy about presenting itself as a place that works. Prototype Island, at its best, is where designers get to ask what that might look like next.

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