Seoul Design
International Forum
서울디자인국제포럼

[Special Interview] Deana YU

Q. In what areas does the NYC Service Design Studio work and which departments do you mainly collaborate with? Could you share one project that was most memorable for you? At the Service Design Studio, we kind of work like a city agency but we're a consultancy. So, we work with many different city agencies to improve their social services using service design. And as a consultancy, I get to work with a lot of different partners and one of those is the Department of Social Services, which is, I believe, one of the nation’s biggest social services departments. They administer so many social services like housing. And in particular, we partnered with them on the CityFHEPS Program, and we helped create flyers and sort of assets and tools that they can use to talk to people about programs. So we worked with them, and we conducted interviews to think about how can we make these fliers accessible to the people that are going to read them. Using pictures, icons, graphs, things to communicate really complicated New York City policy.

[Special Interview] Uwe CREMERING

Q1. How much more importance does social value and sustainability have in the iF Design Award today, and how are these changes influencing the design scene in Korea and Asia? Actually, at iF Design, we have a holistic view of the product itself, and sustainability, social responsibility, as well as environmental responsibility, has played a significant role over the last decades. But over the last years, we have really focused a little bit more on this topic and we did it in line with our main participants and also a consultation of external experts, and we have dedicated criteria for this, called sustainability. And, it has 20 percent of our overall ratings go to this criterion.

[Special Interview] Helle SØHOLT

Q. What are the key conditions needed to make Seoul a more human-centered and attractive city? For Seoul to be a more human centered and attractive city, the city needs to focus on the public spaces. And by that I mean streets, squares, parks, rivers. The public spaces are an untapped resource for supporting the social infrastructure of the city. And that is what is needed for the city of Seoul to become a livable city in the future.

[Invitation] Invitation from Speaker, Lorenzo IMBESI

Lorenzo Imbesi, a speaker at the Seoul Design International Forum 2025, is a Professor at Sapienza University of Rome and President of the Cumulus Association, the leading global network of design education. In his presentation, he will explore how design education networks foster collaboration and drive innovation across global cities. He will highlight the evolution of design from an individual practice to a collective cultural infrastructure, sharing Italian examples of participatory design that bridge tradition and innovation.

[Invitation] Invitation from Keynote Speaker, Helle SØHOLT

This is a special invitation message from Helle Søholt, keynote speaker of the Seoul Design International Forum 2025. As the CEO and Founding Partner of Gehl, she will share her perspectives on the future of Seoul and global cities through the lens of design. A world-renowned urban design expert who has led the transformation toward people-centered cities, Helle Søholt delivers a warm greeting and message as the keynote speaker of the Forum.

[Special Interview] Jeffrey T.K. Valino Koh

1. In countries like Singapore, various tax incentives and policies are provided to support and nurture design-related startups. What type of government support do you think is most effective in fostering the growth of the design industry? I think it’s important to understand that the design industry in Singapore is not necessarily the same as in Korea. In South Korea, design often focuses on creating objects or crafting compelling experiences. In Singapore, however, design is more about process redesign.

[Special Interview] Chris van Duijn

1. What do you think is the ideal urban space in Seoul and why? What’s interesting about Seoul is its diversity and variety, which makes the city truly unique. One notable feature is its proximity to the mountains. On the slopes of the mountains, you’ll find villages with a unique, fine-grained scale and rich texture where people live, work, and dine.

[Special Interview] Craig Kiner

1. What was it like to return to Korea and visit DDP, a place you personally contributed to designing? It was a pleasure returning to Seoul to attend the Seoul Design International Forum 2024. I was involved with the design, development and construction of DDP over 6 years. I thoroughly enjoyed visiting the facility once again. Considering the facility is now10 years since completion, the building has performed well. SDF and SMG have been superb guardians of DDP organising a broad programme of events to ensure the facility remains a key component of the cultural infrastructure and life of Seoul, with art, fashion, music and design at the forefront.

[Special Interview] Birgit Mager

Do you have any advice or words of wisdom for Korean students aspiring to become leaders in service design? If you would like to be a leader in service design, you should try to be a tree-shaped person. What is a tree-shaped person? You have to have deep roots and you have to have many branches. So the deep roots are the roots in design research. You need to have a good understanding on how to understand a complex system, how to visualize a complex system.

[Special Interview] Prof. Dr. Peter Zec

As someone currently traveling across Asia, could you share your thoughts on what you find most inspiring about Seoul’s design compared to other cities in the region? I think Seoul has developed very strongly in the last decades and I would compare the designers from Seoul and from Korea with the designers from Italy.

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.

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.

Special Interview: Yap Lay Bee

Many successful cities around the word share one key attribute - a high-quality urban environment, brought about by a strong emphasis on excellent architecture and urban design. In Singapore, we are proud to be recognised globally as one of the world’s most liveable cities. A key contribution in achieving this accolade has been our long-term and integrated approach to planning which ensures that sufficient land is safeguarded to meet our future economic, housing, social and recreational needs, and our integrated approach to land use and transportation planning which ensures that developments are easily accessible by road and public transport, and that the city is walkable and pedestrian-friendly. The long term planning approach and timely investments in supporting infrastructure networks have given us the reputation as a “city that works” – one where high quality buildings are designed in the context of their surrounding urban landscape, and where buildings have mixed uses or shared public spaces that are able to enhance social and community life. This has not been achieved by Government initiatives alone, but through setting out clear and strong visions and plans and through close partnerships with the design and creative community, professionals, developers and other industry stakeholders.

Universal Design and City for Everyone

The Seoul International Seminar on Universal Design1) that began in 2013 introduced and discussed the universal design of Seoul and major cities around the world. Introduced by Ron Mace, the concept of universal design refers to a functional and attractive design made accessible to all people, regardless of age, disability, or life cycle.2) Therefore, universal design connotes a significant meaning for urban planning and design. Instead of an urban space only for the healthy and economically active group, it aims to make a city for all, including the elderly and persons with disabilities. Universal design also suggests the possibility of a new urban paradigm. The concept of neoliberal entrepreneurial cities that surged in the deindustrialization era placed emphasis on competition among cities to attract capital,3) which deviates from the purpose of a city for all. Many cities struggled to grow and become competitive to acquire higher positions on global city rankings. Sometimes, they were more faithful to meeting the needs of domestic and overseas capitals than taking care of the socially disadvantaged. Accordingly, universal design brings up the creation of social values as the topic instead of competitive values, offering an opportunity to shift the paradigm and make cities warm and kind for more people.