ARTICLES

Seoul Design Olympiad
OFF: Dream or Reality?

by ferdinand(corte)™

The Seoul Design Olympiad 2009 (SDO) opening, Seoul Olympic Stadium, Corea, on September 9th, 2009 - (c) 2009 SDO. Courtesy Seoul hall.

In 2009, the Seoul Design Olympiad (SDO) is celebrating its first anniversary. Initiated in 2008 by the City of Seoul and held at the Jamsil Olympic Stadium, the site of 1988 Olympic Games, and other places around the city, this international contemporary design event helped to designate Seoul as the World Design capital for 2010, especially with the enormous Dongdaemun Design Plaza project by Zaha Hadid. This year, under the aegis of “i design”, inferring that we are all designers, the SDO consists of a range of events including conferences, exhibitions, competitions and festival, all between 9 and 29 October.

“The (Seoul Design) Conference, is an international forum for design exchange, where designers, educators, entrepreneurs and urban policy makers from around the world get together to discuss the present and future of design...; the Exhibition to forecast global design prospects, to present design status quo and future possibilities, and to project the vision of Design Seoul… ; the Competition for finding innovative solutions to existing problems by calling for ideas both in Korea and internationally, and for generating ideas and discovering new possibilities trough integration of ideas from multidisciplinary and multicultural backgrounds as well as through interflow, fusion and consilience of manufacturing and production... ; finally the Festival, transforming the city into spaces of design culture, in which various design programs are run for 21 days for the citizens to come out and enjoy...”: is how the Seoul Design Foundation announces the Olympiad.

This is certainly a great initiative, since design has invaded every aspect of society, from private life to the public domain, from our mobile phones to supermarket trolleys. However, despite the “i design” theme of the 2009 SDO highlighting the fact that we are all designers, the event does not seem to be open to all.

It lacks the popular and educational dimension of an OFF, such as can be found at Art Basel Miami Beach with its more than twenty fairs or the FIAC (Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain) at Paris with Slick. How would one go about organising an SDO OFF? What could be its aims and objective?

It seems obvious that this should first and foremost be a collective event, not designed by a handful of initiates. Why not return to the principles of Collective Intelligence dear to the French philosopher Pierre Lew and applied by the Bluo™ rhizome. With a selection committee elected by the citizens of Seoul; a call for candidature extended to all, students and professionals alike, to both connoisseurs and neophytes, from Seoul or from elsewhere; creators chosen by the selection committee and exhibited in a central space according to collectively chosen themes and criteria, the “other” projects exhibited on an Internet site that develops along with the proposals, a non-restrictive site; a modelling studio for submitted projects that do not yet have “appearance value”; educational and practical workshops; enterprise creation workshops for entrepreneur-designers; public debates, etc.

This is but an idea of what you could accomplish should you have the desire and should you decide to join our team (*).

However, if SDO says that we are all designers, the German Joseph Beuys showed us that we are all artists. Our society of today is steadily losing its values and meaning; we no doubt need more reflection than form. Fortunately, there are certain individuals who are taking action and organising networks in resistance to the system and its excesses. Let us then hope that Art will shake off its “artifice” and will move closer to its role in our society: that of reinvention.

La Charité sur Loire, 30 August 2009

Seoul Design Olympiad 2009, Seoul Olympiad Stadium, image generated by 3d modelling - (c) 2009 SDO. Courtesy Seoul hall.