Assoc. Prof. Agnes Xue Lishan

Singapore Institute of Technology，Design and Specialised Businesses

Research Area: Healthcare Innovation

Speech Title: Harnessing Design Approaches to Create New Value

Research experience: A Red-Dot and A’Prime Design award-winner and the first Industrial Designer in Singapore to be  awarded the Doctoral of Philosophy (PhD) qualification from the National University of Singapore  (NUS), Dr Agnes Xue received the NUS President’s Graduate Fellowship and was a NUS Research  Scholar, investigating on better approaches in the design of self-care devices and applications for  women’s health. She is currently an Associate Professor, Co-Chair of the Design and Specialised  Businesses Cluster Applied Research Committee, and Programme Director of the Design  programmes at the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT). Her research interest has always been  exploring better designs for healthcare that will have user-centric impact in this digital age. Her  professional and teaching experience include work at Siemens Medical Instruments, the Design  Singapore Council and NUS. She was previously the Curriculum Head at Singapore Stanford  Biodesign programme A*STAR-EDB and has trained over 400 budding medical device innovators.  As a published scientific author and educator, Agnes is a frequent speaker at local and international  conferences and an experienced grant reviewer. She is well versed in “design” broadly, and the lines between the disciplines have always been  vague and they are blurring rapidly. All professions are in flux, and her own original field of  Industrial Design is no exception. Thus, it is quite common for designers to defect from their  original design discipline and move to an adjacent design field. Her domain expertise lies in  product, healthcare, visual and spatial branding, speculative and interaction. The common thread  running through my scholarly activities is a unique interest in engaging health and care for different  communities in research. Her research program works through a health and care lens, employing needs-finding approach, participatory methods and collaborative approaches to solve unmet health challenges in real world  environments. She is a pragmatist researcher who works across methodologies (quantitative,  qualitative, and creative-based) in partnership with clinicians, engineers, students, statisticians and  allied practitioners on applied research agendas. She is an advocator of design thinking and bears  multi-disciplinary aptitudes in conducting my research whilst borrowing from various theoretical  traditions (critical, post-colonial, and Asian-centric) to enhance my artistic sensibility. She regularly  collaborates on trans-disciplinary teams with scholars in different fields. She believes in the  importance of fostering strong community-based partnerships and developing capacity-building  opportunities for all those involved, particularly community organizations and members. Collaboration is a critical aspect of her work. Within collaborative academic settings, she typically practices as a design consultant where she provides expertise on user-centred design or design  research methods. As a practitioner on these projects, she has had a significant impact on the final  deliverables associated with the longer research goals. At her university as well as the Singapore healthcare ecosystem, she has built collaborative relationships with colleagues in Engineering,  Computer Science, Hospitality Business, Nursing, Occupational Therapy, and Social Sciences.