2026 Singapore Good Design Awards: Designing Better Lives for a More Liveable World

Lianhe Zaobao, 2026新加坡好设计标志奖 把日子变好让世界更宜居

(Summarised translation)

The annual Singapore Good Design (SG Mark) Awards held its awards dinner on 10 September, recognising winning projects across architecture, experience, spatial, digital and product design. From a national garden in the heartlands and a hospital waiting-time prediction tool to an AI-powered pastry experiment, the projects all address the same question: how can design make our environment more liveable, conserve resources and enable smoother interactions between people and systems?

One of the Gold Award winners is Neural Palate Kueh, which brings together traditional pastries, architecture and artificial intelligence.

An assistant professor from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) used a multimodal large language model to “deconstruct” traditional pastries in terms of eating rituals, cultural symbolism, geometry, production processes, materials and textures, before translating these characteristics into architectural design principles.

Kueh lapis, for example, could correspond to Golden Mile Complex, while huat kueh bears a resemblance to the ArtScience Museum. Through this process, traditional pastries become more than food: they become geometric forms carrying memories and culture — “edible cultural archives”. The project raises an intriguing possibility: could architectural language also emerge from taste and food culture?