Malaysia’s Design Landscape Study: mapping the digital/experience design talents

Izwan Ismail
2 min readOct 22, 2020

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A UX Malaysia workshop circa 2012. Conducted by Caleb Tang,A Malaysian specialised in accessibility design based in the UK leading a workshop in Kuala Lumpur.

I am intrigued to learn where in Malaysia are the experience design talents coming from, their educational background, and their ethnic background. Malaysia blessed with ethnic diversity — but the question I have is, “Does it reflect within the industry.” I hypothesize that it doesn’t. There might be fundamental challenges (i.e., access to the internet, personal computers, etc.) that restrict them from successfully joining the Digital Workforce.

Designing the survey to include ethnic background can be really tricky but we need data.

It is a sensitive topic, but with no data points — we cannot make informed decision in building the industry

It is a norm in Malaysia to fill up forms asking for your race/ethnic background. Malaysia is blessed with many religions and ethnicities living together and building a nation. We are known for our natural resources and have mapped the landscape and economy well; what about the digital economy? — what about Experience Design?

This section of the survey should help me in mapping Malaysians working in Malaysia. But the are foreign talents who are working in Malaysia and Malaysians who are abroad and practicing design. I don’t want to miss out on that data set!

If not practicing in Malaysia, then where are they practicing?

I am very excited to see what results this will produce and mapping it against the pay scale data will surface.

Experience design is relatively new in South East Asia. When I started, we have small, distributed communities. I have met successful practitioners outside of Malaysia and believe that they are more talented out there, but where?

I am excited to see the results and what it will surface!

This journey is an exciting one for me and I have been getting encouragement ever since I announced it on LinkedIn. I would love to hear more from those who are interested, please share your thoughts 🤗

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Izwan Ismail

I am a contributor and keen observer of Business,Technology and Design in South East Asia.