Sproutastic, an educational platform that teaches Singapore primary school kids about sustainability and growing microgreens, has won the World Summit Award (WSA) Young Innovators category – shining a spotlight on SMU alumna Huei Suen Tan, the designer behind the platform.
The WSA Young Innovators category recognises market-ready digital solutions already creating real-world impact in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. This award is organised by the International Centre for New Media, an Austrian non-profit organisation and is a long-running global recognition for digital innovation with social impact.
Huei Suen designed Sproutastic for Singapore-based sustainability company Greenairy, coincidentally an alumnus of SMU’s signature Business Innovations Generator (BIG) programme. Sproutastic has engaged over 500 primary and secondary school students across its school network, teaching them about crucial environmental topics, such as green energy by blending digital learning with hands-on real-world action.
The gamified sustainability education platform was recognised for its efforts in advancing three United Nations Sustainable Development Goals - Quality Education, Responsible Consumption and Climate Action, and was presented at the WSA Global Congress in Vienna in May 2026 alongside winners from around the world.
The design journey behind Sproutastic
For Huei Suen, a 2021 graduate of SMU’s School of Information Systems who was also in the first cohort of the university’s Smart-City Management and Technology programme, this award is the culmination of a personal journey to devote herself to design since her graduation.
She realised early on that a purely software engineering role was not the right fit and became more interested in solving business problems through creative and human-centred approaches. This led her to pursue research opportunities with Associate Professor of Computer Science Kotaro Hara, where she contributed to an accessibility-focused project supporting visually impaired users through crowdsourced scene descriptions. That research experience became an important portfolio piece that helped her secure her first full-time role in user experience (UX) design.
Huei Suen went on to secure a UX position in a digital transformation role for the B2B and B2C services of a Singapore-based distributor of heavy machinery parts across the Asia-Pacific.
“My job at the distributorship was about digitalisation of processes,” said Huei Suen, “and identifying ways to automate business processes. This understanding of the movement of orders, warehouse activities, and fulfilment processes helped me to learn how to create better design decisions and operational improvements, and this was a valuable experience as design is often relegated to the end of a startup’s solution.”
Human-centred design, she came to realise, should be prioritised to ensure a technological product stays relevant.
“Often, startups and ventures bring design in after the big decisions have already been made, when it's treated as how something looks rather than how it actually shapes the way people behave and work together. This is where I want to make a difference – using human-centred design that encourages business strategy for growth,” she said.
And that’s the lesson she brought to Sproutastic. “As the first designer brought into Sproutastic, I brought the systems thinking that shaped the platform from the start - turning a single piece of hardware into a broader sustainability learning platform,” she said. Sproutastic is therefore more than a digital learning platform. It allows students to experience hands-on learning and offers teachers a resource they can use straight away, while Greenairy's plant towers get put to real use in the classroom.
Having Huei Suen involved early really changed how the platform took shape, said Tanvi Thombre of Greenairy, which was incubated by the BIG programme in 2022. "It never felt like we were passing over a finished product to be designed. We were figuring out the experience together from the start, and the platform is much stronger because of that."
Sproutastic has also received positive feedback from educators and partners, which include the World Wildlife Fund and Girl Guides Singapore.
A new chapter in London
In 2023, Huei Suen pursued a master's degree in service design at the Royal College of Art in London to deepen her understanding of human-centred design. Service design is a discipline that focuses on how human-centred design can be applied at a greater scale to complex systems, organisations, and social issues.
She also started her own practice YourDesignBestie as a TikTok channel. As her TikTok channel grew, she decided to build an independent practice to offer design services. She wants to tap into the energetic startup ecosystem there with her service design experience. Her projects involve UX design, product design, and service design.
She said, “This is where SMU's emphasis on participation, presentations, and discussion-based learning have really helped me to become more confident in client-facing environments. I was a lot more introverted before university, and the repeated exposure to communication-intensive coursework has given me skills that are now essential to developing my business and entrepreneurship.”