A commentary on the SG Mark 2026 cohort
By Yong Jieyu, Co-Chair, SG Mark, Design Business Chamber Singapore
We spent a long time discussing a steel bar.
Not a building. Not a facade, but a reinforcing bar, the kind buried inside concrete, that nobody will see once the structure goes up. The argument was not really about the bar. It was about whether it was Design at all, and if it was, whether it belonged in the same conversation as the products and interiors we had been looking at all morning.
The winners and top accolades of SG Mark 2026 are now public, and I would like to share about the conversations that happened inside the juror’s room, where discussions and debates about what SG Mark 2026 stands for took place.
1. The best design this year is easy to miss
For a long time “good design” carried an implied promise of something you could see. A form, a finish, a surface resolved with care. That promise is still here, and much of this year’s cohort honours it beautifully. But what provoked the longest conversations was often the work with the least to look at.
The steel bar, SENSE 600®, was one. The ABEL Microsampler, which quietly rethinks how a routine medical sample is taken, was another. Wayfinding on an ordinary HDB street, designed purposefully so a resident living with dementia can find their way home. An alert system for a senior living alone to feel safe and accompanied. Each one of these projects changed or created fundamental underlying conditions to make design matter more.
What struck me is how much harder this is to judge. When design excellence means being invisible to the user, all that is left is the rigour and impact it leaves us, and that takes longer to notice (and judge). I suspect that is why those discussions ran long. We were not disagreeing so much as recalibrating how we perceive and judge good design.
2. Sustainability is something you do
Every design award now receives many submissions that speak the language of sustainability fluently. The vocabulary has stopped being a differentiator. What separated the strongest work was not how well it articulated an intention, but whether it had actually been implemented, at scale, with consequences someone could point to and prove.
There is an uncomfortable distinction between “showing” sustainability and doing it. A pavilion can take sustainability as its subject and communicate it superbly, and that has real value. Sustainability can also be an intervention that reduces material impact across an entire sector even if it is not noticeable on the surface. Both matter, and we are getting clearer about which is which.
The part I would most like our industry to sit with is the question of scale. Large impacts can sometimes be through smallest changes or are impossible to see with the naked eyes.
A substitution in a base material. A change in a process. A decision invisible in the finished result but enormous once multiplied. Increasingly the two run in opposite directions. You can see the range in this year’s sustainability winners, from the Singapore Pavilion at COP30 Belém and Make Room for the Wild to City Square Mall and DBS JoySpace.
3. Craft is also about what it changed
Craft is often judged on its own terms. Is it resolved? Is the detail considered? Does it hold together? This year, something equally important surfaced. We also saw the kind of craft that left you thinking about the change it has affected because of how well it had been crafted.
Craft and impact are not mutually exclusive. Craft is how impact gets delivered, and impact can be awe or(and) change.
A wayfinding system that a person with dementia can actually follow is a triumph of typography, contrast, and graphic sensitivity, and that is craft. Hullbot is a robot with propulsion and mechanisms designed in conjunction with a business service to ensure ship hulls are cleaned, improving fuel efficiency and reducing emissions. Take away the product-service design crafting and the impact goes with it.
We shift the questioning of craft mastery in design from “is this well made” to “what is the craft in service of”. Public service tools such as One Placement re-presents backend tangled systems into a simple, effortless citizen experience. Peek and Mobile Workstation for Community Nurses considers sensibly how work and processes flow; and empathetically around human needs rather than following strictly to a specification sheet. Converting an apartment into dual-key access, creating an additional income stream for a young, growing family. (MELD @ Twin View) demonstrated spatial craftsmanship in service of a family’s needs. And redesigning what once was a place of recreation (and dating!) during our parent’s time, to what is now a natural sanctuary and destination for families today (Jurong Lake Gardens). Immanuel Koh’s Neural Palette Kueh in his synthetic craft combined neural patterns, local food sensories and architectural stimuli to create conceptual food architecture as quite literally food for thought about the possibilities of using deep tech to understand our relationship with our environments.
Today, we see design craft and its making deeply connected to the service of change, creating not only what is beautiful today, but also participating in the conversation of what should be relevant and important tomorrow.
4. Good design lives beneath the surface
This year, our SG Mark winners showed us design decisions and execution that is hidden beneath its form. It sits underneath something: inside a wall, beneath a process, behind the screen, or what’s actually holding up a system. This year’s award recognises good design and rigour hidden from plain sight, while celebrating its impact beyond its surface.
For designers and design businesses, the practical shift is this. We should shift from documenting what we made to documenting what changed because of it.
We should not only photograph “the object” but also evidence the impact. For Singapore, design is increasingly the layer underneath it, in how our industries lower their footprint, in how people can live better, how citizens meet public services, in how our buildings age, and in how we can age in our buildings and neighbourhoods. It is clear, for Singapore, design is capability and future charting, not a nicety.
Hosting SG Mark 2026 has been deeply rewarding. I look forward to your own conclusions.
View the full list of SG Mark 2026 winners
The SG Mark 2026 Awards Ceremony & Exhibition and the DBCS Gala, themed ‘Next 40: Leading Design Transitions,’ took place on 10 September 2026.
