ThinkPlace strives to preeminent in the field of strategic design thinking in the most complex social, economic and environmental systems. We create public value, bringing about transformation that makes significant difference for people.As the Managing Director in Singapore, i work with my passionate team to partner with our clients in Singapore and Asia to tackle the most challenging issues facing countries.We pride ourselves for stunning execution in everything we do – work for the client and the systems, space and processes to support that.We also want to give back, by contributing not just through our work but through the ThinkPlace Foundation.

Debbie is a Principal Consultant and Education Lead in ThinkPlace’s Singapore studio, a strategic design consultancy that works with public, private and NGO sectors to innovate their services and transform from within. As the Executive Management team, Debbie advises on the growth, vision and strategy of the studio. She is the de facto Chief Innovation Officer within the studio, where she is at the forefront of developing ThinkPlace Singapore's innovation toolkit. She takes care of the quality of work within the studio, ensuring stunning execution and high quality of products and services with the clients. Her key projects include: 1. Service design and customer experience: Lead service transformation and customer experience projects with public sector clients e.g. HPB, CPF, IRAS, MUIS. Certified customer experience strategist and touchpoint design. 2. Participatory Design and Co-design: Lead engagement with the public and customers of clients such as the National Parks, Singapore Food Agency, Municipal Services Office in Singapore using participatory design and co-design methods. 3. Customer journey and process redesign: Develop change in customer experience and employee processes through the use of customer journey mapping and lean methodology. Examples of projects include the MUIS Halal certification process, grants redesign in Singapore4. UI/UX: Develop user interface and digital experience to deliver consistent and seamless digital touchpoints for customers of all ages. Expert in usability testing. Some interesting projects include redesigning of the onePA portal and Passion Card Application, DBS LiveBetter on digibank. 5. Design coach and trainer. Debbie is certified by Roman School of Management in Business Design Training and facilitation. She has been coaching design thinking and design leadership to leaders and managers for over 10 years.

Believing that design has its greatest value when applied to public challenges, Debbie is one of the pioneering team members of The Human Experience Lab of the Public Service Division since 2012. Her role is to help Singapore's public agencies inject human-centricity into Singapore's public policies and services through a user-centred approach in design thinking. During her position with THE Lab, Debbie has led the development and training of the Design Practitioners Programme for the public service, spearheaded the “Design for Public Good” initiative - to help agencies adopt a human-centric approach to design citizen-centric policies, processes that seek to improve citizens' lives using the design approach; and led multidisciplinary projects with NEA, LTA, MND, and other agencies, coaching and mentoring the public officers involved. She has also developed and wrote a toolkit on "My Guide to Design for Public Sector - Tools, Mindsets & Reflections". Key projects include:1. Project Lead for Project Love Punggol, a an inter-agency initiative, co-led by NEA, HDB and PA, that aims to develop new ideas that will enable stronger community ownership and responsibility of Singaporeans for their neighbourhood, community and environment. 2. Project Mentor for Project SmartMove, with LTA to understand motorists travelling behaviours for lifestyle needs3. Project Mentor for Project Bersih, a inter-department project with NEA to redesign the hawker centre hygiene and cleanliness so as to encoiurgae shared ownership amongst patrons, stall holders and cleaners. 4. Project mentor for MND and statutory boards on developing meaningful volunteering experience for public good5. Project mentor with a multidisciplinary team of officers from MOM, STB, MOH, RP on Project Towkay, on enabling working adults to be entrepreneurs.

Certified by Rotman School of Management's Rotman DesignWorks as a Cerfiied Business Design facilitator, Debbie is the Centre Director of DesignWorks Singapore, a business design and innovation centre within the Polytechnic. Using the Rotman Business Design Methodology, she leads her team to help Singapore enterprises adopt the Business Design practices to open up new opportunities and business models through strategic enterprise workshops and projects. • In less than 2 years, Debbie has worked with over 20 clients on a variety of the business design offerings. She has also facilitated and led over 200 executives in various business design workshops and bootcamp. • In these workshops, Debbie often take a lead role in teaching, leading and advising clients from ethnography research, concept visualisation, prototyping and user feedback; to systems thinking, strategic capabilities and requirements, resource and planning. • Examples of projects she has worked with include developing business design capabilities for Tru-Marine Pte Ltd, a marine Singapore SQA organisation; creating the new membership experience for the fashion community for 5 brands of Wing Tai Asia.• She has also organized the business design fiesta with Roger Martin as the keynote speaker and attracted 1000 people to the night conference.

As a senior manager, Debbie has led and executed key initiatives and programmes in business capability growth enablers, with a focus on developing policies and programmes on design and grant initiatives, for Singapore enterprises of various sectors. Seconded to a multi-agency taskforce ‘Design for Enterprises Unit’ by MTI and MICA, Debbie championed the ‘Design for Enterprises’ initiative, a multi-agency national strategy aimed to help Singapore enterprises to build design capabilities for competitive advantage. She organised the official launch of the initiative and attracted about 200 participants from the private sector. To date, Debbie has engaged over 30 top Design Schools, design thinking organisations, design-related associations across Europe, USA/ Canada including California College of the Arts, Parsons School of Design, Institute of Design and Rotman Scool of Management. She has also assisted over 20 SMEs in adopting Design Engage programme within a year.Debbie also represented SPRING at the Economic Strategic Committee 2010, Sub- Committee 5. Recommended strategies in design and innovation, key to building competitive Singapore enterprises over the next few years.