Seoul Design
International Forum
서울디자인국제포럼

Mini studios for meditation at the center of busy city; Calm City & BEtime in New York

Everyone wants to live well, mentally, and emotionally, and build and maintain healthy relationships with families and other people in life. Also, people value intangible achievements in life and strive to live a better life each one desires. Unlike in the past when people wanted to have more material wealth, indicators for “living well” have changed, so people in modern society started to recognize the importance of balancing material wealth and emotional wealth, which increases attention on how to live well and plan well for the end of life. In addition, the world’s population is aging quickly and causes various social problems including a change in the demographic structure, family breakdown, increase in single-person household, etc. and new controversies arise, which is shedding a light on not only living well but also dying well, a concept around better quality of death at the final moments of life. In Korea, the concept of dying-well or well-dying was discussed as part of living well which was one of 30 major programs proposed for the study to establish a Basic Plan of Social Problem-Solving Design of Seoul Metropolitan City (2021-2023). The proposal established a master plan of key projects about developing a probe-kit that would facilitate reflection on past moments in life and digital content and improving citizens' mental health, and Seoul City is working with various institutions to promote “dying well” in the society to help citizens prepare for a meaningful end of life.

Impact of Social Problem Design and Conditions for its Success

In this article, I will first introduce how social problem-solving design has evolved for the last 30 years, and as a result that we should approach social problem-solving design in a way different from the traditional design of a single product. In particular, I will tell how it is important to assess the long-term performance of design, and the need to have a strong link to policy to successfully implement the design.

Universal Design Paradigm and Universal Design Cities

On March 30, 2007, 82 UN member countries signed the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), the world’s first comprehensive human rights treaty of the 21st century. The CRPD adopts the principle of equality and non-discrimination to safeguard the dignity and rights of all individuals with physical, mental, or intellectual disabilities. A total of 182 countries ratified the CRPD as of December 2021. Given that there are 196 countries, 93% of the adoption rate is quite impressive. UN highlighted the success of the CRPD as ‘a paradigm shift ,’​1)​ while WHO in 2002 changed its view on disability from the medical model to the social model. The former regards disability as a personal matter and the latter sees disability in terms of milieu. With such changes, people started to perceive disability as a social issue rather than an individual problem and understand that ‘environment’ is a powerful impact factor either ‘enabling’ or ‘disabling’ a person. As a consequence, designers needed to embrace a new approach, shifting from special designs for the few with physical disabilities to inclusive design for all. Some designers believe that design can be considered ‘good’ when it satisfies different needs of people. On the other hand, many creative designers instead applied ‘universal design’ to come up with winning global applause. The CRPD also specified ‘universal design’, coined by an American architect Ron Mace, in the action plan as ‘design of products, environments, programs, and services to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design.’ This propelled many initiatives to cultivate and advance the universal design paradigm in our society.

Exploring the concept of social problem-solving design and its value, and evolutionary direction

Societies around the world are increasingly facing more diversified and complicated problems (e.g.: social structure and policy, climate change, chronic infectious diseases, inequality, etc.). And recently, in addressing these social problems by developing an actionable solution through collaboration with stakeholders, “social innovation” is emerging as a useful concept, and the use of human-centered participatory design approach is emphasized as a practical methodology to execute this concept. Unlike the conventional supplier-centered innovation that involves a top-down approach, these concepts focus on a bottom-up approach that emphasizes social connectedness, and the role of design as an elaborate problem-solving tool is critical in implementing these concepts.

Special Interview: Ezio Manzini

To answer this question a premise is need. To do it, I refer to what I wrote a decade ago​1)​ : in a fast and profoundly changing world, everybody designs. ‘Everybody’ means not only individual people, groups, communities, companies and associations, but also institutions, cities and entire regions; and ‘design’ means that, whether they like it or not, all these individual and collective entities are forced to bring all their designing capabilities into play to devise their life strategies and put them into practice. The result of this diffuse designing is that society as a whole can be seen as a huge laboratory in which unprecedented social forms, solutions and meanings are produced and social innovation is created. Therefore, to discuss “What do you think the city government should do to improve the value in the cities and in the lives of their citizen through design” we can refer to two types of design skills: (1) that of experts (expert design) and (2) that potentially widespread among citizens and citizen organizations (widespread planning). It follows that, for cities, the main objective should be to promote the design capabilities that are widespread in citizens and in their organization. This is the way to release the energies that exist in the city. To do this it is necessary to develop a new type of governance which could be called collaborative governance. In this framework, the role of design experts should be to activate and support the capacities of citizens and their organizations to be active and to use their widespread design potential.

We Solve Problems Around Us on Our Own! (2)

When a case of a child abuse is reported, the abused child is separated from parents, needs to wait at a police precinct or police station to undergo an investigation and has to live in a child protection agency. During this process, the child feels uneasy and stressed by unfamiliar spaces and people. In addition, the child may feel the guilt of causing this situation by his or her own fault. “Hoya Toto” was devised as a solution to resolve the anxiety of abused children in the unfamiliar environment by forming a bond with police officers.

We Solve Problems Around Us on Our Own! (1)

Citizens are the people who best know the various discomforts experienced while living in a city. There is a limit for public officers and administrative experts who try to close the distance to solve the problems felt by the citizens. In 2015, the SMG introduced “design governance” as a public design project to receive reports from people on public problems and improve the problems with a team comprising citizens, experts, and businesses. All the progress and outcomes of the project were made public on the website to be spread and utilized flexibly.

Sustainable Clothing Design for Children With Cerebral Palsy With the Heart of a Mother

Public design that turns daily inconvenience into something beautiful and efficient; the “needs” of public design start from the following three situations. First, people are too familiar with the problem situation. Second, there is no known solution, or the needs are in the blind spot of the managing body. Third, the needs cannot be discovered easily because of special circumstances. This is the reason why the starting point of successful public design should be accurate identification of the inconvenience of users.

Special Interview: Rachel Cooper

When thinking about Design as a resource for the city, it is important to understand the attributes of Design. Thinking about the Design process and the ability to translate numerous interdependencies into a tangible visions, is very much the value of Design. Many government organisations are looking to Design as a way of creating value, buy helping policy makers rethink policy, around issues such as net zero, health and wellbeing. Design organisations within government should be organised in such a way that they are able to synthsise science social, science and cultural insights, to help policy makers, and citizens co-imagine alternative furture, imagine the implications, benefits of policy and service design. This means Designers at the heart of government in policy labs, insight and foresight units. In terms of creating value one of the areas that design needs to engage with is the notion of value… how does new policy, new services, new urban design contributribute to environmental value and social value. Much work has been undertaken on establishing the natural capital value of enhanceing environments through policy making and design, much less has been done on how to establish social value through Design and quantify and evaluate it. This is the much more complicated area where Design needs to establish a strength.

Special Interview: David Berman

Let me answer with a story. In the summer of 2008, I had the honour of meeting Mayor Oh Se-hoon at Seoul City Hall as part of the Seoul International Design Forum for which I had travelled from Canada for. On the way to the event, my first time in the city, I was struck by how integrated the design disciplines were. I recall saying to a colleague “When we were in China, we were saying they are catching up with us. In Korea, they have already blown by us.” Why? In Canada, the design disciplines were siloed: here in Seoul, they were delightfully integrated, both horizontally and vertically: from alphabet to surface to building to infrastructure. To discuss one without the others simply didn't compute, and I wondered “How is this done”? The answer came when I was introduced to the person to the Mayor’s left: their business card read “Chief Design Officer”. At that point in my career as a speaker, I had travelled to over 40 countries, and this was the first time I had heard of a City having a CDO. This explained how Seoul was doing such an impressive job of integrating the design disciplines. Ever since, in many travels, I have shown that card as evidence of a keystone to excellent design governance ... to any government clients who would listen. Here in Canada, we have our design strengths that are admired by others, such as our leadership in inclusive design, our national flag, and many other proud habits. However, every time someone in our government asks me how we can maximize the value of design I tell them it all starts with what Seoul has done: every major plan should be vetted by a CDO in the C-Suite, sprinkling design thinking into every project charter.

Panel Discussion

The theme of the 2021 Seoul Design Forum is Re-Connect: Design as a Value Creator. If the main purpose of design is to create new value, what value creation should design focus on, unlike value creation in other areas? We wonder what the difference will be in terms of value creation from a corporate or public perspective.

Metaverse Dreams of A Shared, Connected and Expanded City

Why Do We Desire Cities? Homo sapiens and Neanderthals had something in common. They both built houses or small cities and lived in groups to survive in the wilderness. But outcomes were different. Homo sapiens indeed survived, while Neanderthals became part of history. Unfortunately, we can spot in our cities several factors that pushed Neanderthals into extinction. We’ll explore them further in a unique world known as the metaverse.

Evolution of Social Problem-solving Methodology

LBS Tech is a startup that defines and solves social problems by providing a platform for the use and mobility of people with visual and physical disabilities. It supports people with disabilities in “using” ordering, payment and reservation services efficiently. On the other hand, it also provides convenient “mobility” services by providing building information, pedestrian navigation, and user location information. The fundamental basis of the systems comes from careful consideration of cities.

Absolute Value of Design and Innovation – Thinking Beyond Competitiveness

Previous design innovation aimed at gaining a competitive edge, but today’s design innovation in products, services, or policies raises the necessity of absolute values. In order to establish “good brands,” companies and institutions should bear in mind that unlike the past, it is hard to build trust when there is no originality as distribution channels of content diversify, resulting in intensifying competition. Customers can now compare and analyze various brands thanks to increasing data and diversified channels conveying such information. In other words, creating innovative momentum or developing brands using previous method is no longer effective. As customers today access numerous contents, unforgettable consumer experiences can only be made through a new dimension of challenges; hence, the need for absolute innovation. Companies mainly consider “the targets to connect their products, services, and policies with” for absolute innovation. Still, the most significant thing is to understand the core value of services, products, and policies which have strong chemistry with customers based on understanding the momentum of customers.

Design Strategies that Make Urban Experiences Special

Welcome, everyone. I’m Lee Hye-young, director of Design Policy Division at the Seoul Metropolitan Government. This year’s event is held under the theme of ‘Re-connect: Design as a Value Creator.’ In line with this, I’ll focus on various values that design offers by sharing people’s experiences in my presentation. What are some experiences that you find special? We face many different situations in life and go through numerous emotions. We sometimes feel afraid, isolated, or bored. Some cities give us negative emotions mostly, while others make us feel calm, excited, or respected. Cities should provide positive experiences to residents as well as visitors. Then what role can design play to help cities achieve this goal? I’ll share some examples in Seoul to demonstrate the values that design can bring as a core urban strategy.

Citizen-centered Problem Solving, The Value and Performance of Social Problem Solving Design

This presentation aims to accomplish three goals - to introduce concepts and methodologies of social problem-solving design; to draw value of social problem-solving design from cases shared at the previous forums hosted by the city of Seoul; and to put forward designers’ future role and vision in relation to the evolving social problem-solving design. Intro: Widening a Role of Design Across the globe, we’re seeing more complex and diverse issues in our society ranging from social structures and policies, climate change, pandemics, to inequality. Design’s role and potential are expanding in addressing these issues. The Ministry of the Interior and Safety has included public service design in the Administrative Procedures Act to encourage citizen participation. Similarly, the Seoul Metropolitan Government has incorporated social problem-solving design into its policies and general plans.

The Value of Universal Design Enhanching a City Branding and Success

The Universal Design International Seminar hosted by the city of Seoul from 2016 to 2020 made a contribution to the evolution of universal design. And we’re in the process of re-connecting the achievements so far with values that create urban competitiveness and branding. At the same time, the unprecedented pandemic has upended every aspect of our life, causing distress and a sense of alienation. Against this backdrop, the presentation focuses on the necessity and achievements of design policies incorporating ‘design as a value creator’ into people’s everyday lives and our society that yearn for restoration and healing.

City Desgin as Investment in the Future

Welcome, I’m Oh Se-hoon, the mayor of Seoul. It is my great pleasure to be here at the Seoul Design International Forum. I would also like to express my gratitude to the speakers. Today, I would like to focus on ‘urban design.’ Design is capable of creating values. And cities must be able to offer values to their residents. When cities have values, they become more competitive and provide a happy, fulfilling life. Therefore, design is a key tool that drives cities’ competitiveness. A city is our legacy for generations to come as they pioneer into the future. Given this, urban design is an investment for the future.