Theresa works as a Lead Experience Designer in Architecture and believes that good design empowers people. She loves listening to people’s stories, empathising with their experiences, and learning what drives behaviours. Armed with a design education in architecture, she practised within the public service for 5 years to hone her skills in heritage conservation, urban design, public policy, and stakeholder management. Much of her public service career was dedicated to stakeholder collaboration and policy implementation in the historic district of Chinatown. Theresa drove the transformation of Car-Free Sundays at Telok Ayer toward a ground-up approach by leading and facilitating stakeholder engagements with Chinatown’s businesses and cultural institutions. Collaborating closely with the stakeholders, Theresa pushed the boundaries of Singapore’s car-lite initiative to quadruple the turnout and participation.
Her passion for driving change and going the extra mile for public engagement led her to receive the URA Made-A-Difference Award in 2019. In 2022, she was also awarded the URA Game Changer Award, where Theresa drove the milestone conservation gazette of Golden Mile Complex with a multi-disciplinary team from start to finish. Theresa’s strategic ability to balance user and organisational needs through engagement with a complex ecosystem of stakeholders manifests in the work she’s done to develop design guidelines and parameters for urban building typologies that enable master planning and urban design on a national level.
Most recently, Theresa has been spearheading key aspects of the redesign for ICA’s immigration clearance process, taking a human-centred approach to balance complex regulations and stakeholder needs.