ETH Singapore Month 2021

What will the post-pandemic ‘new normal’ look like? Assumptions made about the state of the world will have to be reassessed, notwithstanding the shared desire to return to normality as quickly as possible. Business-as-usual practices that have delineated collective behavior in the past, will need to be re-evaluated according to the lessons learned from COVID-19.

How can science, technology, and design – the design of forms of societal organisation, of cities, of policies, of the everyday – inform, if not trigger, changes that are long overdue? Which radical decisions will have to be made, not only concerning the current crisis but also in view of other global challenges awaiting in the wings, so to speak?

These are some of the questions that will be addressed at the ETH Singapore Month, based in the the external page Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) in Singapore. Inspired by ETH Zurich's Critical Thinking Initiative, the summer workshop brings together graduate students from different disciplines and universities to tackle contemporary societal and environmental problems in a setting that promotes critical and creative thinking.

The workshop, themed "Post-Pandemic Future", aims to identify potential solutions concerning the future of health in the context of a highly urbanised world. In particular, the tenets of the external page United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – understood as a modern-day social contract – will be re-examined and accordingly re-written considering envisioned post-pandemic futures.

Foregrounding the role of scenario planning and design thinking as platforms for multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary work, students will be confronted with “wicked problems” – to borrow an expression introduced by design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in the 1970s.

Teams of students will be asked to deploy their imagination and respective disciplinary knowledge to develop approaches for transferring scientific and technical findings pertaining to societal challenges into applicable propositions. Moving from science to technology to design, the educational framework will foster self-critical thinking and an ethical posture vis-à-vis society at large via dialogue and playful interaction.

Lectures by researchers from a range of disciplines as well as by public officials from Singapore agencies will highlight specific themes that will subsequently be addressed by smaller groups in a so-called atelier setting. The latter’s didactic approach will be framed by five input themes that students will be asked to simultaneously confront:

• one of the 17 SDGs foregrounding a particular global challenge
• models of governance raising the question of policy and societal organization
• a theoretical text allowing to situate the work within the history of ideas
• a modeling or prototyping technique addressing the importance of 'making' within design 'thinking'
• a particular physical context within which to ground the work in situ – i.e., the specificity of place.

The input themes aim to bridge the alleged gaps between theory and practice, the general and the specific, as well as the abstract and the concrete.