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.