Forum: Don’t ask students to wow you if you’re not ready for it
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What my neurodivergent son experienced as he transitioned from school to the workplace recently brought home the commentary “Singaporeans say they want creativity. But do they mean it?” (June 15).
My son was diagnosed with moderate to severe autism as well as dyslexia at a young age. After an extended journey, he graduated with a diploma in interior design at 27 from a local polytechnic in April 2025.
There, lecturers strongly encouraged the class to be mavericks in design and steer away from being predictable and “too safe”. For the final-year project, the lecturer asked the class to design a designated scene of five to 10 years in the future, and said: “Wow me!”
My son chose to design a retail outlet of the future, selling sneakers. He came up with a naturalistic meadow-themed, two-storey structure complete with a digital model and architectural details, including a unique way of displaying sneakers without any shelves.
To probe his thought process, I asked why there were no shelves to display the sneakers on. My son laboriously explained that shelves might be obsolete in the future. In his design, each sneaker is individually held and managed by an illuminated, robotic tube-like arm with proximity sensors and superchips to move the sneakers in response to what the customer wants. This, in today’s terminology, is “AI-powered”, an unfamiliar concept to my son then.
Then came the wet blanket responses from the lecturers during the weekly design review sessions: “Why don’t you stick to shelves, like every other store?”, “I don’t think customers in the future would behave the way you see it”, and that there was no need to be fancy as it was “just a shoe shop after all”.
When the final presentation came to grade the students, I encouraged my son to present his sneaker store design the way he saw it, never mind the resulting grade. I believed in my son and his vision for the future. He scored a C, which to me means Creative Champion!
Had the response to my son during the reviews been: “Your idea is good, show me more!”, his reply would have been: “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”
So, please don’t you say “Wow me!” if you are not ready to be wowed.
Ho Wan Weng
