Events & Convenings
Prototyping Cultural Resilience Across Emerging Tech & Policy
17 September 2026, LASALLE, University of the Arts Singapore
Decision Making Theatre
Rethinking UNESCO Culture | 2030 Indicators:
Exploring Cultures in Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)
The Decision Making Theatre offered a unique immersive experience designed for LASALLE students and executive leaders from the Futures and Public Policy programme at National University Singapore. The event addressed a fundamental policy gap: while culture underpins the UN Sustainable Development Goals, its true impact remains under-monitored due to severe data vacuums, resource constraints, and Western-centric metrics that fail to capture Global South realities. To bridge this divide, the Lab unveiled two interconnected solutions that operationalize Foresight 3.0. First, the SDG Cultural Observatory app demonstrated how open-source proxies, satellite imagery, and AI-driven analysis can measure cultural vitality across Environment, Prosperity, Knowledge, and Inclusion without placing heavy data-collection burdens on nations. It bridges global data vacuums, enabling policy leaders to visualize culture's transversal impact on sustainable development across every dimension.
Second, a suite of creative digital works translated abstract data into lived, sensory experiences.
Environment & Resilience
VR Experience: Moving Stillness by Maya Dance Theatre & Avventura, Christopher Chew
By immersing viewers in ocean plastic debris, this VR installation grounds its narrative in Asian traditional dance practices that emphasize structure and rhythmic cycles. It exemplifies the Environment & Resilience dimension by using embodied cultural performance to address climate action, marine conservation, and environmental health.
Prosperity & Livelihood
Graphic Novel: Sprawl: God's Lonely Man by Felix Cheong
Following a taxi driver displaced by a tycoon's land grab, this graphic novel confronts aggressive urban growth and corporate overreach. It directly targets the Prosperity & Livelihood dimension by exposing how systemic economic displacement dismantles life-sustaining infrastructure, threatening the material foundations of local creative and economic communities.
Knowledge & Skills
Game Experience: New Village by Debbie Ding
This 3D walking simulator transforms hand-drawn memory maps of 1950s Malayan internment camps into a navigable virtual archive. Aligning with the Knowledge & Skills dimension, it demonstrates how creative digital tools can preserve, translate, and transmit intergenerational memory and cultural heritage when physical heritage site structures are lost.
Inclusion & Participation
Robotic Experience: Shared Autonomy by Jackie Tan
Using neural-interface headbands that detect brain signals and head movements, this system allows individuals with severe motor limitations to paint collaboratively with a robot. It embodies the Inclusion & Participation dimension by dismantling physical accessibility barriers, ensuring equitable cultural access, and restoring creative agency.
The convening culminated in collaborative speculative design sessions, where LASALLE students and policy leaders utilized these tools to prototype future development scenarios, identify systemic data gaps, and co-author actionable policy pathways. By uniting analytical precision with creative praxis, the Decision Making Theatre redefined culture from a passive reporting requirement into an active, strategic engine for shaping resilient futures.
26 May 2026, LASALLE, University of the Arts Singapore
Incubator
Hacking the Asian Waves:
Shaping Cultural Flows in the Global Cultural Imagination
This incubator addresses the multipolar realignment of cultural power within the global creative economy. Participants will engage in methodologically rigorous foresight and speculative prototyping of cultural flows emanating from three regional powerhouses: China, Japan, and South Korea. By deploying emergent technologies—including Virtual Reality (VR), knowledge graphs, and predictive analytics—the incubator models, stress-tests, and refines resilient cultural strategies. Through dedicated research sprints led by international experts, the program interrogates topics ranging from the participatory remediation of Chinese motifs and the data-driven mapping of anti-Hallyu geographies to the computational analysis of anime's visual grammar. Our fundamental objective is to empower participants to actively navigate the global creative frontier, ensuring Asian cultural forms transcend algorithmic circumscription to achieve agentic circulation.
12 December 2025, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Incubator
Cultivating Next-Generation Praxis for the Creative Economy
The inaugural Culture Future Lab Incubator was launched not merely as a workshop, but as a direct intervention into the status quo. Its urgent mission: to transcend theoretical debate and forge actionable, prototyped methodologies for engaging with culture in an era of immersive technology, artificial intelligence, and generative systems. Participants engaged in immersive prototyping sprints, hands-on with emergent technologies including VR environments, AI-driven geo-visualization platforms, and digital authentication tools. These sprints, while distinct in focus, collectively chart a coherent roadmap for the cultural sector's evolution. First, they underscored a fundamental shift from consumption to co-creation, whether with historical artefacts, analytical datasets, or generative algorithms. Second, they demonstrated that the primary challenge is now design-oriented, requiring the creation of “conversational infrastructures” and formal protocols that structure collaboration between human intuition and computational power. Third, they documented intentionality and ethical oversight as non-negotiable principles for responsible innovation.
