Abstract
In 2016, the Seoul Design Foundation, a city-funded design organization in Seoul, carried out a program that aims to solve local problems in the city by catalyzing collaboration between designers and civil servants. The one-year program, called “Design Consultant” program, supported 15 design projects addressing problems at a sub-district level through the collaboration with sub-district offices in Seoul. This paper examines the underlying strategies of the program to address a city’s problems, and at the same time to promote the adoption of the design in the public sector. Four projects carried out under the framework of the Design Consultant program were studied by interviewing the civil servants and junior designers who collaborated for five months at local sub-district offices. Keywords: transformation design, local administrative offices, scaling out, scaling up, Seoul metropolitan city.
Highlights
With the growing interest in the potential of design-led innovation in the public sector (e.g., Bason, 2013; Manzini and Staszowski, 2013; European Commission, 2013; Burns et al, 2006), a number of programs and projects that attempt to address social issues by using design – with an emphasis on collaboration among diverse stakeholders, including public bodies and citizens – have emerged over the recent years
Four projects carried out under the framework of the Design Consultant program were studied by interviewing the civil servants and junior designers who collaborated for five months at local sub-district offices
Despite some conflicts and challenges, all the civil servants who were interviewed during this study positively evaluated the collaboration with designers, and showed willingness to participate in similar programs in the future
Summary
With the growing interest in the potential of design-led innovation in the public sector (e.g., Bason, 2013; Manzini and Staszowski, 2013; European Commission, 2013; Burns et al, 2006), a number of programs and projects that attempt to address social issues by using design – with an emphasis on collaboration among diverse stakeholders, including public bodies and citizens – have emerged over the recent years. This paper pays a particular attention on the potential of a city-scale design project to address local problems in the city. This paper examines a case of the “Design Consultant” program, run by a city-funded design organization in Seoul, to address problems in the city through collaboration between designers and local sub-district offices
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