Transforming Taipei Through Social Design

Almost everyone who drives is familiar with the experience of being misdirected by confusing traffic signs and signals. It’s frustrating and makes you wonder why it is that no one has come up with the comprehensive and consistent signage needed to unravel our urban maze.

In fact, the Tai­pei City Government is currently utilizing the principles of social design to do just that.

You might ask what on earth “society” has to do with design. After all, design is nothing but aesthetics and function, right?

The design elements wending their way onto Taipei’s streets are making city life a little more interesting.

The July 6 issue of The Economist begs to differ. It includes a column on IDEO, a major American design consultancy that is helping the Singaporean government to streamline its process for handling work-permit applications. The column concludes by musing that “since public agencies have generated so few good ideas of their own, a bit of outside help would appear to be worth trying.” The piece delves into the shift from product design to “social design,” a field in which IDEO is deeply involved.

In Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, IDEO CEO Tim Brown offers a concise and comprehensive definition of social design: redesigning processes and services to transform the social world.

Tai­pei has made strides toward incorporating design thinking into its planning in recent years, and this year applied to the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (Icsid) to be designated World Design Capital 2016. The bid, themed “The Adaptive City,” emphasizes how the city government is working with designers to improve the city and enhance its quality of life.

Liou Wei-gong, commissioner of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, points out that the World Design Capital designation isn’t a measure of a city’s design prowess but of its use of design to resolve urban development issues. Previous designees include Turin, Italy; Seoul, South Korea; Helsinki, Finland; and Cape Town, South Africa.

 

Since 2012 Tai­pei has rolled out 17 projects that integrate design with policy, and has accepted another 24 proposals from design firms and civic groups. The former program, known as Public Policy by Design, includes initiatives such as having the Public Works Bureau and other departments consult on new construction projects to deal with poorly designed footpaths, which the Health Department identified as a factor keeping the elderly from getting out of their homes to exercise. Another has the Department of Education making 15 unused elementary and middle-school classrooms available to designers free of charge. In return, the designers are expected to organize exhibitions at the schools and participate in team teaching, the idea being to help design thinking establish deeper roots in Taiwan.

The other 24 projects, known collectively as the Stir Design Project, include the Gixia Group’s proposal to integrate traffic signals and signage to make them more easily recognizable and improve the city’s look.

Liou says that these projects not only require interdepartmental cooperation, but also serious consideration of how citizens will use them. Designers, users, and city government departments need to communicate continuously to determine which proposals are the most appropriate.

The design elements wending their way onto Taipei’s streets are making city life a little more interesting.

Government services are frequently targeted for social redesigns that aim to make them more “user friendly” and enhance citizens’ perceptions of their quality. Lin Rung­tai, dean of the College of Design at National Taiwan University of Arts and president of the Taiwan Design Center, believes that redesigning services is the only way to create the high-quality services that are essential to enhancing a city’s competitiveness and building its brand.

The Taipei City Government has allocated NT$200 million to its World Design Capital 2016 campaign. The city is currently the only candidate in the running, and the selection committee will announce its decision in November. Liou says that the most important thing isn’t whether Taipei earns the designation, but whether the city makes use of design thinking to transform into an even more appealing and livable city.