About
Pann is co-founder and creative director of Kinetic Singapore. He believes that “design without an idea is a sin”, a conviction that has guided his work for nearly three decades.
Passionate about design, advertising and communication, Pann has won over 550 industry awards, including Gold Pencils at The One Show, a Yellow Pencil at D&AD, and four President’s Design Awards, Singapore’s highest design honour, including Designer of the Year in 2013.
Under his leadership, D&AD ranked Kinetic fifth globally for Design Agency in 2022. He has served as Jury President at D&AD, Adfest and the Kancil Awards. In 2011, he founded HolyCrap, a family art collective whose Rubbish Famzine series, Issues 1 to 12, was acquired by the Singapore Art Museum for its permanent collection.
Pann continues to mentor young designers through talks and advisory roles at design schools. While pursuing his MA in Design at LASALLE College of the Arts, University of the Arts Singapore, he developed the Eleven Dimensions of the Human Soul of Design, a framework defining what remains irreplaceably human in the age of A.I.
The Life and Death of the Human Soul of Design
The Life and Death of the Human Soul of Design is a practice-led research project that asks what makes the human designer irreplaceable in the age of A.I. It proposes the Eleven Dimensions of the Human Soul of Design, a framework that names the qualities A.I. cannot replicate.
The research was tested through interviews with senior practitioners, a blind-judged design probe, eight case studies, and a community campaign that gathered 405 responses from more than twenty countries.
The findings take three forms. A thesis, the academic argument. A publication, framed as a eulogy and housed within a skull model kit. Additionally, an exhibition at Basheer Graphic Books staged and presented the entire inquiry in physical space, open to public view.
Research methodology and theoretical framework
The research is practice-led; the knowledge comes from the act of designing and not only from writing about it.
'The Eleven Dimensions' emerged first from nearly three decades of practice, then was brought into dialogue with scholarship across design, psychology, philosophy and ethics.
The framework was tested through four independent methods: practitioner interviews, a blind-judged design probe, real-world case studies, and a community campaign. The findings rest not on any single method but on how the four triangulate.
Rhea Pasricha
Sam Li
Masturah Maidin
Ly Du Khanh Han
