SINGAPORE INSTITUTE
OF TECHNOLOGY

Always when we kick off a new project & we’ve spoken to all necessary stakeholders, it’s important to solidify where we think we are in the market, who we’re talking to, the challenges we face, and most importantly, where we’re we’d like to go next. This begins with a site audit and customer profiling.

To assess the competition and know where we’re situated in the market, we looked to competitors across the industry. We looked at all aspects of the online experience provided by both local and international universities and private institutions like design, ux best practice, messaging & copy, ease of use, unique features, content strategy and more.

Sometimes your initial assumptions are wrong, and having them proved wrong can alter the entire trajectory of a project. Having begun this project speaking in-depth with stakeholders, professors and group heads across all divisions of SIT, we’d assumed the motivations of students today were the same as decades ago: a desire to get out there; a longing to challenge and prove yourself. Not so.

We conducted a series of workshops over the course of a week with approx 40 participants and learned that students today exist in an uncertain world, shaken by the tectonic forces of innovation, artificial intelligence, automation & industry change. They’re less motivated by status and far more motivated by fear & uncertainty. Uncertainty that whatever they study may not be relevant in 10-15 years time.

To make matters worse, parents today feel unqualified to offer advice. What seemed like words of wisdom only a decade ago would nearly certainly be terrible advice today. Parents often feel overwhelmed by the changes in recent times and have no idea where to turn for help.

During the course of our workshops we uncovered another major issue: SIT wasn’t considered one of the “big 5” universities in Singapore. There was an element of prestige, pedigree and accreditation of the other uni’s that SIT simply didn’t have. SIT was instead thought of as a kind of polytechnic – a perception solidified by a cultural preference for more traditional career choices. SIT’s offering (Artificial Intelligence, design, aerospace, UX ‘etc’) was considered “new” and “risky” by contrast.

This was perhaps our greatest challenge: to use design & a new way of thinking and talking that showed Singapore (and the world) that SIT’s offering was unique and relevant to the modern world.

The answer was to shift the paradigm completely: to no longer think of SIT as a “traditional university” in the same vein as the others, but instead to reimagine and rebrand the school as something entirely different.