How did a bottom-up party this big come together at Singapore Design Week?

The organizer's question was simple: "Is there something, anything, that could get everyone talking?"

Singapore Design Week looked different in 2018.

The citywide design festival, run by the DesignSingapore Council, reached its fifth edition this year. Its stated goal, which runs to 2025, sounds very large: design should drive innovation in Singapore's economy and make the city more lovable.

Working toward that, this year's program added a good deal beyond the two traditional anchors, SingaPlural and the International Furniture Fair. There was Brainstorm Design, a three-day forum held for the first time, with creative people from many fields and many countries giving talks; a community project in Holland Village; and a walking design tour of the city made with the National Heritage Board. More people took part this year, and the program was more varied. More than 90 organizations and individuals across the city ran events alongside Design Week, and the Italian embassy squeezed in an Open House on March 5 and 6.

Busy as all this looked, Singapore design still has no clear face for many people. A country independent for barely 50 years, it has no long cultural tradition and has yet to produce a distinct style that others want to copy.

Agnes Kwek, the DesignSingapore Council's executive director, calls Singapore design "a unique blend of creativity, business and public policy." Asked how the country would actually become design-driven, she answered: "I want to see everyone with a basic ability to design."

The biggest community event of this year's Design Week was "District & Design Dialogue — Holland Village" (DDDHV). The neighborhood, tucked behind the Singapore Botanic Gardens and ringed by university campuses, became a small working model of what Singapore means when it says it wants design woven into the city.

Over the ten days of the Holland Village pop-up, you saw designers and artists, but you saw ordinary residents more. On one street in Chip Bee Gardens, ten empty houses were turned into pop-up shops selling and showing food, exhibitions, streetwear, art, live music and workshops. The mood was loose and busy; strangers stood around with ice cream cones and talked like old friends, as though art, ideas, fashion and design had always been part of daily life.

Say "Holland Village" to most Singaporeans and what comes to mind first is the food from a dozen countries, the loud bars, and the shops full of well-made small things.

As the name hints, the Dutch were the first to settle here. But the name in fact honors an early resident, Hugh Holland, an architect much respected locally.

The Dutch did not set the neighborhood's look, either. In the 1950s the British military put up the black-and-white semi-detached terrace houses that define it. Holland Village then began drawing expatriates arriving in Singapore, most of them from the upper classes. For the past thirty years it has been known as a well-off residential district, and trades of every kind grew up to serve the rich. Its shops sell expensive imported food and international-school uniforms.

People who live here say that without its mix, Holland Village is nothing. As Western culture poured in, the village became the cradle of fashionable Singapore living. The first of the city's distinctive bars and cafés opened here, and in the 1990s a wave of upmarket vegetarian restaurants followed.

After that, Holland Village's story is the story of every neighborhood that loses itself in a crowded rush to modernize. The MRT station opened. The "bohemian street" label got louder. The windmills that once stood among the houses gave way to shopping malls. Tourists arrived in wave after wave.

As a destination, Holland Village pulled people in like a magnet. Inside the community the pull ran the other way. The easy familiarity that had held the place together thinned out, and the distance between its 300-odd households kept growing.

Justin Long, who has lived in Holland Village for 12 years, found this puzzling. His two-year-old son played happily with the neighbors' children all the time, while he himself barely knew the neighbors. Adults, it seemed, were stopped by not knowing one another; children had the trick of making friends on the spot.

He wondered: "Is there something, anything, that could get everyone talking?"

Last October, Justin saw the DesignSingapore Council's open call for community design projects, and the idea arrived at once. The call was tied to the next year's Design Week; the Council would act as a platform and provide support, and any community, designer or organization in Singapore could apply, with no set theme or format.

Justin decided to use Design Week as his occasion: hold something in Holland Village that would fold design into daily life and give neighbors a reason to talk.

"District & Design Dialogue — Holland Village," curated by Justin Long, opened ahead of schedule on March 9. Each of the ten houses along both sides of the street had been painted a different color, with a small custom-designed flag at the door to greet visitors. The designers who moved in fussed over the little front yards until each had a character of its own.

The first house you enter is Say Hi To_House, put together by Say Hi to_, a French creative agency that publishes an online magazine of the same name. The curator, Kristen de la Vallière, turned the house into a small gallery showing the work of ten designers: the black steel-tube geometric furniture of Dazing Feels Good (DFG), seen at last year's SingaPlural, and rugs by the Singaporean designer Olivia Lee that had been shown at Milan Design Week, among others.

In an upstairs room of Say Hi To_House, Joanna Chen, founder of the travel clothing-rental company Gibbon, was explaining her business to visitors. Gibbon signs contracts with clothing companies in destination cities and rents travelers local clothes on arrival. The point is to take the luggage out of travel and make the trip simpler. The service has reached Amsterdam, where it costs 22 euros a day and charges for three days at most. Gibbon posts a full set of clothes to an address booked in advance; before leaving, the customer puts them in the bag Gibbon supplies and someone comes to collect it.

For Holland Village, Joanna Chen made a set of playful "notices": an airport full of people with nothing on, because Gibbon exists. Through displays like this, she hopes to collect more answers to one question — what do you want to wear?

The second house held a show made for children, curated by the children's magazine eyeyah, whose founders, Steve Lawler and Tanya Wilson, moved to Singapore more than ten years ago. The magazine works with artists to teach children about real problems — the damage done by phone addiction, the environment, social questions — through lively, likable illustration.

At the show, eyeyah hung work by more than 30 artists: framed on the walls to dress the house, and printed on children's T-shirts, hung in rows.

Sole Superior, a homegrown Singapore streetwear fair now in its fifth edition, opened its first pop-up shop here. The house, called Sole Superior's Party, was stocked with sneakers, skateboards and baseball caps, along with the special pieces Sole Superior has made over five years with XLarge, FIN, Novesta and other brands.

Another house, Runway, became a showcase for Singapore's newer designer labels: the womenswear brands Waiyang and Ametsubi, the menswear brand biro, and the eco-minded accessory labels Heads of State Millinery and Just Gaya. During Design Week the brands also ran hands-on workshops; MessyMsxi, a rising Singaporean illustrator, held two sessions on painting plants and landscapes in watercolor.

After the streetwear and the designer clothes, The Lounge set out to show "how to live better." It gathered lifestyle brands started by Singaporean designers — The Gentle Label, a British home and body care brand in fact founded by a Singaporean designer, and Candles of Light, a plant-based fragrance brand. Upstairs, The Fragment Room let visitors work off their stress: a crate of glass bottles and clay pots sat at the entrance, and for one Singapore dollar you could pick one, carry it into the wooden room inside, and smash it.

The Library was the quieter house, curated by Sing Lit Station, which also ran another Design Week show, Out of Print. On the ground floor it built a reading room with Basheer Graphic Books, a well-known local independent bookshop, where you could read or buy. Upstairs was the "writer's room": a different writer came to stay each day of the event, and visitors could sit down and ask them anything.

The Playground was probably the children's favorite. To get in, you first had to cross String Maze, a small maze of cord built to a child's scale; touch the wrong string on the way through and you got tangled.

Workshops of all kinds ran here too. Saturday Kids, a children's education outfit, taught programming through games, and Inez Designs brought a craft workshop for parents and children to do together.

Last came The Stage, a platform for local music that brought Singapore's musicians and artists together for a live performance every day. Upstairs was an odd little restaurant: knives and forks set on the tables, and headphones, cassettes and MP3 players on the plates.

The Kitchen was the house that tasted good: pop-ups of local street snacks and homegrown food, plus a few chains. Häagen-Dazs dressed one of the upstairs rooms with flowers and sold cones in its newest flavors. Its marketing manager, on site, said the company came here to promote the season's ice cream and to show off packaging by different designers.

On the first weekend after the opening, 9,998 people came down the street. Justin had lined up more than 30 businesses around Holland Village to offer discounts during the event and make special coffees, cakes and desserts. What he did not expect was that 16 other households joined in on their own: the neighbors' children sold lemonade, cake and baked goods at their front doors, and some people sold art out of their garages.

It worked better than he had hoped, and Justin calls it a "bottom-up" grassroots movement. His reason: although it was part of Singapore Design Week, the content, the organizers and the participants all came together by themselves, and the DesignSingapore Council drew no boundaries.

It was also the first event of this size Justin had ever run. He and Jerry Goh founded the creative agency HJGHER in 2006, working in brand design, curation and interiors. When he first came into the field, he says, Singapore design was still "in its infancy." Like most Singaporean designers, they were learning their own culture and working out what else they could do with it.

In 2009 HJGHER launched Underscore, a magazine covering art, culture, fashion, design and the creative industries worldwide. Through the magazine Justin came to know more than 500 creative people around the world, and nearly everyone who took part in Holland Village came out of that circle.

His biggest problem in Holland Village was time. Three months separated winning the open call from opening day, and in them he had to think everything up, plan it, build it and run it — from settling the proposal with the government down to how many tables and chairs the site needed and how much food.

Most of the work fell to him, but Justin would rather credit the event to a lot of forces pulling together.

The ten houses were bare when he took them over, with no air conditioning. He rented them for a month and the event ran ten days, but he still bought air conditioners out of his own pocket to fight the heat. Later he went to the landlord, the Singapore Land Authority, to talk it over; he was told he could leave the units in place when he cleared out, and the government would pay for them.

Planning the event worked much like making a magazine. Justin first found ten empty houses on one street in Chip Bee Gardens, then went door to door to get the agreement of the street's other 79 households.

The next question was what to put in each house, so that every one had its own theme, like the sections of a magazine. He wanted the program to be easy to walk into and full of things to do, ideally "something to eat, something to drink, something to play with," so that people could actually enjoy themselves.

"It's as if we took everyone to one big party," he says. "That's all."

Images: photographed on site

Cover image: Minh Trí on Unsplash