Cover Mark Wee, executive director of the Designing Your Life Institute, on helping Singapore navigate work, identity and AI (Photo: Wesley Loh/Memphis West Pictures)
Mark Wee, executive director of the Designing Your Life Institute, on helping Singapore navigate work, identity and AI (Photo: Wesley Loh/Memphis West Pictures)
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Mark Wee, executive director of the Designing Your Life Institute, explains why life design and adaptability will define meaningful work and leadership in Singapore’s AI-driven future
“We are entering a moment where the most urgent design challenge is no longer technology, but the human being,” declares Mark Wee. “AI is reshaping not just jobs, but identities—disrupting how people understand their worth, their relevance, and their place in society.”
Wee is executive director of the Singapore-based Designing Your Life Institute (DYLI), founded in 2023 and affiliated with Stanford University’s Life Design Lab. While the broader Designing Your Life (DYL) movement originated at Stanford—where educators Bill Burnett and Dave Evans developed a course applying design thinking to life and career decisions—DYLI serves as a regional hub focused on building capacity, forging partnerships and researching impact across society. Burnett and Evans are also the authors of The New York Times No 1 bestseller, Designing Your Life.
“DYLI exists to catalyse a life‑design movement across Asia, starting from Singapore,” Wee says, “that equips people to answer deeper questions: Who am I beyond my work? What does it mean to be human in an age of intelligent machines? And how do I live with intention amid uncertainty?”
People, he observes, are beginning to separate identity from job titles. “There is a growing recognition that while jobs may change or disappear, meaningful work—contribution, judgment, creativity—remains,” Wee says. “A meaningful life is increasingly defined by adaptability, coherence, and the ability to learn continuously, rather than by permanence or hierarchy.”
In applying design thinking to life design, the process begins with an initial step called “Accept”, focused on recognising and embracing where you are now. It is then contextualised around your sense of meaning, how you make choices, and the community needed to support the life you seek. “In design, we learn that clarity rarely comes before action—it emerges through action,” Wee says. In a labour market where roles, industries and even workflows are becoming obsolete, life design reframes living as an ongoing practice of experimentation: try, learn, adjust and try again.
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Above Wee with Bill Burnett (pictured left), executive director of the Life Design Lab at Stanford University
Wee with Bill Burnett (pictured left), executive director of the Life Design Lab at Stanford University
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His own career makes the argument without flourish. “I’ve lived a portfolio life—moving across architecture, public service, education, entrepreneurship, and art, often in parallel rather than sequence—building a career around interests rather than a single title,” says Wee, who was most recently executive director of the Design Singapore Council. What was once unconventional, he argues, is quickly becoming normal. As jobs become less linear and workflows evolve, more people will need the confidence to make decisions without clear pathways, designing lives that are “resilient, adaptive, and self-authored”.
That confidence, Wee insists, can be developed—and Singapore is well placed to do so. “Singapore is small enough to experiment, yet sophisticated enough to scale,” he says, pointing to collaboration across government, education and community sectors. DYLI’s workshops has been adopted across schools, with national servicemen, and with older adults. The point of the range is cultural: mindsets do not change in silos.
The institute’s ambition is deliberately measurable: to equip 20 per cent of Singaporeans with life-design and design-thinking mindsets. “That number matters because it represents a cultural tipping point,” Wee says. When a critical mass can “prototype their lives—to navigate change with agency rather than fear—the culture itself begins to shift”. Life design stops being a niche intervention and becomes a shared social language.
The DYL movement’s origin story began by reframing a familiar question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” In its place, it proposes another: “What do you want to grow into as your life design unfolds?” One asks for a destination; the other asks for a practice. In a culture that prizes certainty, the shift is quietly subversive: it makes room for curiosity.
Above Burnett, who is also director of the Designing Your Life Institute, is the co-author of The New York Times No 1 bestseller “Designing Your Life”, alongside Dave Evans
Burnett, who is also director of the Designing Your Life Institute, is the co-author of The New York Times No 1 bestseller “Designing Your Life”, alongside Dave Evans
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In leadership contexts, Wee points out, the implications are immediate: “Life design reframes leadership from control to orientation.” As organisations become more adaptive and “startup-like”, leaders comfortable with experimentation and learning are better equipped to guide others through uncertainty. Performance becomes “less about short-term optimisation and more about long-term human resilience”. The aim is not to lower standards, but to change what is being optimised.
Wee is careful not to position life design as an antidote to ambition. “It aligns well with Singapore’s pragmatism, but challenges our fear of deviation,” he says. “Our instinctive risk aversion—while historically understandable—will not carry us forward.” If Singapore aspires to remain a global innovation hub, he argues, it must “rediscover our creative confidence”. He also sees this work complementing the spirit of SkillsFuture, Singapore’s national lifelong learning movement.
For the life-design movement, “success would look like a society where change no longer triggers panic. Where people trust their ability to adapt. Where leaders prioritise judgment and learning over control”, Wee says. If even 20 per cent of Singaporeans approach life with that confidence, “the cultural shift will be irreversible—and quietly transformative”.
For those accustomed to designing portfolios and legacies with care, Wee’s proposition carries an inversion. “The real question is not whether AI can do your job,” he says, “but whether your current way of working will still matter.” Life design, then, is a disciplined way to keep meaning, agency and creativity in play—so that the human being remains legible even as the systems around them keep rewriting the rules. For Wee, that is how intention becomes a national habit.
As Senior Editor of Tatler Singapore, Hashirin champions and refines the storytelling across platforms—curating and crafting compelling profiles, cover stories and features that spotlight visionaries shaping culture, business and impact. Driven by curiosity, she draws inspiration from the artists, changemakers and trailblazers she encounters through her work. Beyond the pages of Tatler, she is an avid supporter of local theatre and delights in seeking out art in every city she visits.
