Dr. Beng Kiang TAN, a Visiting Fellow with the Center for Public Interest Design, will be sharing her experience embedding a participatory approach in design studio and non-design studio projects toward social impact. The approach is applied to different scale projects ranging from visioning masterplan to micro-scale design and build projects. Projects are often in partnership with agencies or non-profit organisations and address real world issues. Students learn empathy through experiential learning of being involved in real-life projects.

Associate Professor Beng Kiang TAN is an educator and registered architect in Singapore with rich practice experience in both the public and private sectors prior to joining academia. As a strong advocate of participatory community design, she leads design studios and service learning projects in Singapore and Southeast Asia. The projects have been exhibited in various exhibitions such as Archifest and Design for the Common Good International Exhibition. Her teaching and research interests are in Participatory Community Design, Social Housing and Design for Aging. She is a recipient of numerous teaching and design awards, including the Pacific Rim Award for Excellence in Public Interest Design 2018 for Smile Village project. She is the former Deputy Head of the National University of Singapore, Department of Architecture and former leader of Community and Housing Section. She served as a council member of the Singapore Institute of Architects and currently sits on various technical and advisory committees. She holds a Doctoral degree from Harvard University, MArch from UCLA and BArch (Honours) from National University of Singapore.

The CPID Talks are aimed at fostering a dialogue about interesting work being done that is relevant to the public interest design field by inviting speakers from a wide variety of disciplines to share their work. These talks are open to the public and held in the CPID office in the School of Architecture at PSU (Shattuck Hall 217). Following the talk, attendees are invited to participate in a discussion on the work. We hope you'll join us.