Kiasu Design Life

Did you spot some illustrative stickers on the floors and walls of MRT stations or bus interchanges? These are initiatives to design for dementia and we want to talk more about it! In this episode, we unpacked what dementia’s REALLY like, what’s the current solution to help them in way-finding and our take on this solution. ____ Notes/references we made in this episode: Hsuan's GTMS: ground.news A...

If you ever heard of Design Buddies or is active in Linkedin, you may have heard of Grace Ling based in US. We managed to grab her during her trip to Singapore (fun fact: Grace is part Singaporean too) and spend a fruitful hour together getting to know her better, how she grew a huge community, and unconventional + rising ways to land yourself a job as a UX designer. Grace is extremely bubbly and...

WAIT WHAT?! It's been a year since KSDL's first episode! We can't believe it ourselves..time really flies. We decided to dedicate this episode for us to just sit down together with our teh/kopi, walk down memory lane and reminisce our first year of running this podcast. Join us in this light-hearted episode, where we unveil  some interesting statistics of KSDL (also, hola amigas/amigos 👀), crowd'...

Mentorship is such a beautiful thing - getting guidance from someone more experienced as you navigate your career as a designer. Finding a gem of a mentor, someone who is avuncular, who has the patience and passion can even transform the mentorship into a friendship you can keep! If there's one thing Hsuan regrets in her design career, is not actively seeking for a mentor early :") And that's some...

In the second part of this episode, we're covering the Singaporean traits to...kick! 🦵🏼⚽️ What is it that makes us designers uniquely Singaporean? It’s not just designers who were born here, but also designers who have been based in Singapore for a long time. They certainly may have picked up some local traits along the way.  There's a lot of articles or videos in the web exploring what makes u...

What is it that makes us designers uniquely Singaporean? It’s not just designers who were born here, but also designers who have been based in Singapore for a long time. They certainly may have picked up some local traits along the way.  There's a lot of articles or videos in the web exploring what makes us uniquely Singaporean - be it queuing up for bubble tea, chope-ing tables with tissue, dropp...

"Hi.", "Still avail?", "Can nego?" Whether we like it or not, negotiating for our salary is a step that's baked into the process of our careers. It's something that's not taught in school, yet we're expected to know our ways around it. Knowing your worth is such an important element in our careers, and we'd like to share 3 resources that may help you as a designer negotiate more strategically! :) ...

Early this year, an article surfaced on Mothership about a Ban Mian stall owner who refunded $445.50 to a customer who overpaid (and that's 99x more, siao eh!) for his order. While the article mainly angled around the honesty and integrity of the owner,  we thought there's a perspective around the design and usability to this story as well!  In this episode, we investigated what even cause this $4...

This is our first Chilli Padi episode 🌶️, which you may have already guessed -- means short and punchy ones. Pew pew! Amid the stormy scene in the job market now, we decided to share our ways to finding design jobs in Singapore! We hope this is helpful to anyone out there. Regardless, stay safe friends and drink more teh halia :)  What we mentioned: LinkedIn JobsDB JobsCentral Indeed Friends of Fi...

Riding the MRT is such a quintessential part of us Singaporeans lives (at least for us 😅). Remember when the new line TEL first opened last year, did you know there were also efforts to improve the commuters’ user experience too? Well, we didn’t — until we stumbled upon this CNA article.   Today we are going to deep dive into this and we ensure you will see the MRT at a different light after. You...

Happy 2023! Can't believe Kiasu Design Life has sustained through the year! 🙌🏼 🙌🏽 In Day 6, we recalled our times as new-joiners in our jobs and shared our wholesome and horror stories. You may realise that we sound a lot smoother this episode, that's because we finally tried recording together in person! It definitely delight us a lot and we hope you feel the same. Please enjoy this (hopefull...

Hellllo! We're back from a month break and feeling lemony fresh 🍋 Having a job is a sense of purpose to many of us, it helps us put rice on our table,  finance us towards our biggest dreams. But have you caught yourself thinking "I'm done!" or even looking out for job openings?  In Day 5, we wanna touch on this thorny and juicy topic - "When do we call it  quits?" What principles do we have when...

Hey everyone! It's been some time! If you're active in Singapore's design community space for a while, Kiat shouldn't be a foreign name to you. Following a recent heartfelt email on the closure of IxDA meet-ups, we sat down with the man himself for a casual chat! Kiat took the chance to look back at the past 11 years and shed his true feelings around organising IxDA meet-ups in Singapore. We also...

If we could write a letter to our younger souls fresh into the UX industry, what would it be? In Day 3, we're retrospecting and getting raw this time as we dive into our past experiences along with the lessons learnt. Adilah shared her revelation and ways she differentiates herself as she graduated from bootcamp and into working world, whereas Hsuan revealed her (cool?) ah lian identity and how it...

What do we all think of meet ups and networking now? We pondered, we surveyed, and now we're ready for the big reveal! In Day 2, we are sharing insights gathered from multidisciplinary folks in Singapore across 5 categories - agenda, speaker/content, venue/space, food and audience/crowd. This episode will be enlightening to you whether you are thinking of organising your own event, or joining one....

Ayeeeee! Hsuan and Adilah here! We're so excited to finally launch our first episode. Today in Day 1 of Kiasu Design Life, we talked about what this podcast is as we share our motivation, plans and dreams. (We already have plans for Day 100 already..?) If this still doesn't excite you, listen to us try to build our credibility by sharing our design experiences, how we met (and what FoF actually me...