Red Bus at Somerset to undergo refresh, with challenge held to allow youths to redesign icon

The iconic Red Bus at the Youth Park will undergo a refresh, as part of plans to entice the Somerset Belt to youths today. 

As part of the refresh, the Somerset Belt office – which sits under the National Youth Council – is holding a competition in July for youths to decide what to do with the Red Bus – whether to repackage it or design a new icon “out of the Red Bus”. 

Called the You Decide @ The Red Bus Challenge, it is an initiative under ForwardSG. The top three teams in the challenge will win $2,000 worth of vouchers and get a certificate of achievement. 

Participants can register for the challenge either individually, or in groups of up to three. Thereafter, the organisers will facilitate the participants in forming the groups of five – with other participants who have registered for the challenge – required to be part of the challenge. 

The groups will be tasked to create and propose designs that answer the challenge statement: “What do we want to do with the Red Bus to align it with the Somerset Belt plans, and with present and future youths?”

Participants will be required to attend a pre-challenge briefing on Jul 8, 10am to 12pm at *SCAPE. This is where the groupings for the challenge will be formed. The challenge will then take place on Jul 15, from 10am to 8pm.

Any participants who fail to turn up on either date will be disqualified. 

The submitted designs will be evaluated by a panel of eight judges from Jul 25 to Jul 31. The top 10 submissions will then move on to a second round of evaluation from Aug 7 to Aug 13, where the public will get the chance to vote for the design they like. 

The submissions will be evaluated on the following criteria: impact and communication, feasibility and possibility of production and functionality, emotional quotient, degree of innovation, spatial relationships, visual appeal and aesthetics as well as durability and sustainability.

The three winning submissions will be determined by the total score from judges and public voting. They will be given the opportunity to work together and combine design elements of their proposals, collectively creating one final design for the new icon of Somerset Belt.

 The groups will then have a choice to continue the production and implementation journey with the organisers, or to end their role and to pass the design to the organisers to implement. 

The winning groups will be kept updated on the progress and will be recognised for their contributions when the icon is placed at Somerset Belt.

Open call registration will close at 11.59pm on Jul 6. Interested participants can sign up via the challenge registration form here.

A full list of information and a FAQ on the You Decide @ The Red Bus Challenge can be found here.