Oxana Jeoung Rakova

OXANA JEOUNG-RAKOVA, then a graduate student at Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, was awarded funding in October 2022 to aid research on “Co-Designing for Social Change in Seoul: The Ontological Politics of Participatory Urban Governance,” supervised by Dr. Olga Fedorenko. This project began as an ethnographic exploration of citizen participation in the redesign and improvement of public spaces and services in South Korea, particularly in the capital city of Seoul. As the fieldwork progressed, recognizing that participatory design is a category-in-the-making and not a static analytical concept, the fieldwork expanded to include design discourses in general, as well as an examination of the ways in which citizen participation is conceptualized and assembled in South Korea. Conducted fieldwork included observation of a major citizen participatory design events launched by the Seoul Metropolitan Government; probes into the Seoul Design Policy Division that deals with design policy-making; participant observation at a major service design agency that facilitates events with citizen-designers; attendance at numerous design industry events; repeated visits to the Museum of Korean Design at the Korean Institute of Design Promotion; and interviews with citizen-designers, professional designers, policy makers, social design activists, and ordinary people. The data collected draws attention to the practices through which various actors — humans such as Seoul residents, policy makers, and professional designers in conjunction with nonhumans such as design tools and materials — become political agents and collaboratively create new urban and democratic realities in South Korea through design.