Designing the Design of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics Don Ryun Chang

Home , 2018 Winter Olympics

Reflection Designing the Design of the PyeongChang Winter Olympics Don Ryun Chang

The Past Thirty years after hosting its first Olympic Games—the Seoul Sum- mer Olympics in 1988—the Republic of Korea was given the honor of hosting a second—the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, which took place February 9–25, 2018. I was working in Korea as a corporate identity designer at the time of the 1988 Olympics, and for the 2018 Olympics, I had the privilege of chairing the Design Advisory Committee. The committee played an instrumental role in shaping the holistic design program of the Games and present- ing PyeongChang, and South Korea, to the world. In the intervening years, I have been part of a design industry that has changed almost beyond recognition, much like South Korea. The moment seems opportune to reflect on this course of change, the present to which it has brought us, and the challenges that lie ahead, some of which are unique to the Korean situation and some of which are faced by design and designers all around the world. When Seoul hosted the Summer Olympics in 1988, South Korea was just emerging from a long period of authoritarian government and massive economic transformation. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, economic activity had centered on rapid industri- alization and production for export, directed more or less by government decree. Design’s role in this scheme was as a servant to export-led industry, styling and beautifying goods for international consumption. As the economy matured, design matured along with it, soon outgrowing its subjugation to manufacturing to take its place among the pantheon of creative industries. While its coming of age followed a well-worn path, Korean design now finds itself in unmapped territory; in this predicament, it is not alone—defining the designer’s role in a postindustrial digital economy is foremost among the challenges the design world presently faces. However, it is perhaps only in South Korea that one could have experienced what is essentially a localized version of the broad history of indus- trial design in the span of a single career.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi_a_00592 by guest on 30 September 2021 My work on the PyeongChang Olympics has been instrumental in highlighting the progress made by the Korean design industry and the challenges that lie ahead. In chairing the design advisory committee, I was able to parlay many lessons learned on earlier projects into an approach that sought to “design in” a flexible, collaborative structure that granted the participating artists the autonomy and freedom to create and combine as necessary while minimizing conflict and hierarchy. On a project of this scale and significance, the temptation is always to revert to tried-and- tested formulas, which in the Korean context would mean a closely guided and rigidly structured process toward predictable results. I consciously avoided this form of leadership in favor of what I have come to call a design curation approach. The rationale was as follows: whereas strong leadership and a regimented strategy might have been necessary in the past, when Korean design was still developing,1 its present maturity and diver- sity would be ill-served by such an inflexible approach. What was called for was the means to allow the design process to lead itself— to create the organizational forms that would summon forth the content of the identity program. The role of the design committee was to design the designing of the identity program, to create the structures and forms necessary for artists and designers to create and collaborate. Anything less would have stood as a betrayal of the growth and progress of the Korean design industry. The design curation approach was therefore a mode of design management that treated the design process as the problem to be confronted and was thus a kind of “second-order” design process. It was not a mere abstraction of theory but an attempt to syn- thesize my experience into something that could be more broadly applied. I give a brief account of the basic principles of the design curation approach and explain how it was applied through the work of the Design Advisory Committee, partly to provide some insight to this type of design process and partly to illustrate some of the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

The Present The concept of design curation sprang from my previous experiences participating in large-scale public design projects, such as the redesign of the South Korean passport and the standardization of identity for government ministries and departments. What began as reflective considerations of the successes and difficulties of these projects coalesced into a framework that proved (and improved) itself through application. In many ways, it was the

1 For example, see Kyung Won Chung, “Strategies for Promoting Korean Design Excellence,” Design Issues 14, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 3–15.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi_a_00592 by guest on 30 September 2021 forbidding complexity of the design object (an Olympics identity program) that called for the curation approach: so numerous were the elements, participants, and values in the program that it went beyond the scope of control of any one designer or committee. In the terms of Richard Buchanan’s well-known four orders of design, an Olympics identity program falls in the fourth category, beyond symbols, things, and interactions (the first, second, and third orders into the realm of environments). The Olympics identity program must provide the “idea or thought that organizes a system or environment”2 and thus ground the meaning of the interactions and experiences that occur within it. On a personal level, the design program for PyeongChang was the most complex and formidable design problem I have ever faced. The Herculean task before the committee was to collate and recommend an extensive design program that comprised (among many items) the emblem, mascot, medals, torch, pictograms, and an overall design look such that it could be approved and imple- mented by the local organizing committee and the International Olympic Committee. Its responsibilities lay somewhere between consulting and directing—the committee had the freedom to pur- sue whatever creative paths were necessary but held only partial responsibility for final decisions, and thus had to produce a cohe- sive and cogent identity program to a strict deadline in more or less complete form. This called for a kind of structured flexibility in which designers could combine and recombine as necessary and expertise could be sought and enacted whenever it was needed. So complex was the “object” to be designed that it was not possible or practical to assemble all the knowledge and expertise that might be needed in advance. Flexibility and adaptability were essential qual- ities of the design process. This organizational adaptability was clear evidence in the mascot part of the program. It might be tempting to see an Olympic mascot as somehow peripheral to the main design program—a frivolous addition to the serious business of identity-building done elsewhere. But the committee understood from the outset that the mascot was of utmost importance to the success of the program as a whole. At a general level, a well-designed mascot can set the emotional tone for the Games, providing a recognizable visual icon and a contemporary index of the feel of the Games it represents. In the Korean context, the mascot had a particular emotional res- onance: the mascot for the Seoul Olympics (an anthropomorphic tiger called “Hodori”) was something of a symbolic father figure, dear to the hearts of many Koreans and carrying the pride and trea- sured memories of a nation’s coming of age.

2 Richard Buchanan, “Design Research and the New Learning,” Design Issues 17, no. 4 (Autumn 2001): 12.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi_a_00592 by guest on 30 September 2021 The mascot for the 2018 Games had big shoes to fill. Whereas Hodori proudly stood for the fruition of a generation’s nation- building work and the onward journey that remained, his successor would occupy a much less certain space of meaning. The challenge was to subsume the triumphal certainty and focus of that predeces- sor into an image of progress but frame it as progress of a different and more complex kind. Capturing this complexity in form of a mascot proved elusively difficult. After much frustration and fruit- less exploration, the decision was taken to reboot the process in a very different form—a mascot that was three-dimensional rather than two. A three-dimensional mascot, it was reasoned, would cap- ture in its very form the passage of progress from 1988 to the digital present. This required a very different set of design skills than those that had been attending the task up to that point. A more mono- lithic structure might have foreclosed even the possibility of such a jarring change of direction, especially given the approaching dead- lines and the time already invested. The flexibility of the curation approach meant that new expert advisers could quickly be brought in and empowered to shape a new structure. Thus was born Sooh- orang Tiger, joined shortly after by Bandabi Bear, the mascots for the Winter Olympics and Winter Paralympics, respectively. Their smooth delivery was largely attributable to an adaptive design process that recognized the time spent on two-dimensional explora- tions was not squandered but a necessary part of the process of their gestation. The point here is not just that the organizational structure of the committee’s working environment was flexible enough to allow this reorientation but that such a change in approach at what was a comparatively late stage in the process was possible at all. It was a product of what one could think of as allowing the content to deter- mine the form, rather than the form being determined in advance and demanding that the content contort itself to the form’s rigidi- ties. This recognition was partly a product of the progress that Soohorang and Bandabi were intended to represent—the deliberate move away from strong, single-minded, top-down direction to the reflective, adaptive approach I refer to as design curation. The pair of mascots also stood for the change in the general understanding of what progress means to Korean people. At the time of the Seoul Summer Olympics, the meaning of progress was much more tangible and measurable. At the end of the 1980s, South Korea’s economy ranked seventieth in the world in terms of size, having climbed up from the rankings’ lowest reaches whence it lingered at the end of the Korean War. In 2018, it ranked eleventh. While this is a remarkable achievement, it does leave the remote

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi_a_00592 by guest on 30 September 2021 possibility of further progress in a purely economic direction. Pride in economic achievement has been subsumed into a broader enthu- siasm for social, technological, and cultural progress, with the spread of Korean electronics, music, movies, and videogames much more likely to be cited as items to summon a swelling of national pride than GDP and export figures. As a vector of progress, however, pride in socio-cultural achievement is much less tangible and much harder to compare. Quantitative measures of progress had given way to a more qualitative, less unifying notion. The mascots (and the identity program as a whole) were tasked with giving some emotional substance to this vaguer, more complex notion of progress, which had no readymade set of signifiers to marshal to its needs because it pertained to a narrative that was (and is) still in the process of being told. Accordingly, there was no way the content of the identity program could have been determined in advance as a set of signifiers that the designers simply needed to weave into the form of an Olympic identity program. Instead, the advisory committee offered guidance only on the concepts to be evoked and left the means of doing so to the skill and creativity of the designers—who were, of course, among the very people enacting this progress. The value of this approach depended on the participation of a wide variety of designers, not just the usual luminaries who might normally be sought for such a project. The participation of younger, independent, and specialized designers and artists was invited and encouraged, along with the request to advisers that they draw on their networks and bring in whoever they thought might lend an interesting perspective. In the Korean context, this required a conscious departure from the habits of the past, when seniority played a decisive factor in assessing candidates’ abilities. Breaking from this mode of organization should not be taken for granted—it necessitated a deliberate and determined consideration of the very form of the design process. The success of this approach also hinged on participants’ trust in the process. To this end, every effort was made to ensure that the structure and processes of decision making remained transparent. This is particularly important in Korea, where one’s involvement in a major project might once have been largely dependent on personal relationships with those overseeing it. Whereas informal qualifications and connections might have been useful in achieving rapid results in the past, such practices cannot be justified today. Transparency of process and structure were thus imperative to the success of the project and to ensuring the good faith of all participants. This did not mean relinquishing

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi_a_00592 by guest on 30 September 2021 reliance on one’s networks. Rather, it helped transform the percep- tion of what a progressive network should be, that is, a database of colleagues organized in terms of talent, experience, and expertise, rather than obligation, favor, and irrelevant commonalities. Accord- ingly, networks were an important resource for all participants, who were encouraged to share and collaborate, assisted by adaptive organizational structures that could divide and regroup as necessary based on holistic and segmented design disciplines. This also left space for integrating technological innovations that could not have been planned too far in advance—a notable example is the use of drone arrays to spectacular effect during the opening and closing ceremonies. The design curation approach invoked a revised position on public participation in the design process. Although it took a very open and flexible stance on participation, qualification was condi- tioned by an appropriate level of expertise. Accordingly (and in contrast to earlier large-scale projects), the PyeongChang program did not solicit design contributions from the general public, nor did it seek their input in decision making. This choice—which until recently might have been condemned as unforgivably high- handed—reflects the current stage of development of a design attitude to participation, as well as a maturing of attitudes in governance and accountability specifically in Korean culture. The erstwhile tendency toward direct public participation in major design programs was a necessary corrective to earlier authoritarian disenfranchisement and so was an important affirmation of the democratic spirit. Today, however, it would be fair to say that that urge has run its course, and consequently, its contemporary usage amounts at best to an empty gesture, and at worst to the cynical solicitation of uninformed consent. Public participation in the Olympics design process centered on grounding the transparency on which the design curation approach relies. At various stages of the process, public exhibitions of ongoing work were held as a way of documenting progress and stimulating public interest. No responsibility for decision making was abdicated to the faceless, innumerable figure of “public opin- ion,” for this would have fatally undermined the principles on which the process was established and the good faith of the profes- sional participants. Rather than public participation in the process of the design, the committee actively sought public participation in its product. A key direction of the design program was thus its communicability. An example of this is the set of emojis featuring Soohorang and Bandabi that was released for free use during the Games, allowing

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi_a_00592 by guest on 30 September 2021 people to use this aspect of the design program in their communication. This is of particular salience in Korea—the complex social customs that govern interpersonal communications and relationships in Korean culture mean that emojis play an especially important role in digital communication, allowing people to express a wealth of emotional content through preexisting characters and images that would otherwise be left unsaid. Bringing the mascots into this ecosystem of expression made them active vehicles for emotional communicative content. This extended the potential for public engagement with the design of the Games, and freed it to take on a life of its own by allowing users to confer meaning onto the characters however they wished. In this sense, public participation became an essential support for the success of the Olympics because it extended the scope of that participation beyond merely attending the events or watching them on TV—it allowed people to become active participants in shaping the spirit and meaning of the Games. This participation was enhanced by the use of social media as a vital dimension of the design of the Games. By featuring Insta- gram and Twitter tags prominently in the Games’ identity program, for example, participants were encouraged to give life to PyeongChang as a meaningful concept, unfolding and evolving through collective engagement beyond any central control—an active event rather than a passive spectacle. Relinquishing some control over the identity of the Games might be construed as something of a risk, but it was seen as a necessary advance toward secur- ing the emotional investment of participants. Once again, this required a conscious decision to break with cultural habit and actively think about the design process as an object to be designed. This was ultimately what design curation amounts to: the active designing of the design process. Design curators must concern themselves not with the object to be designed but with the process by which it is designed. Design curators must treat the design process as if it were a design problem: unique, complex, paradoxical. The particular circumstances of the design process must dictate the process of its designing. The designers involved must be treated as its stakeholders, with knowledge and experience to be sought and directed toward a solution. The curator is essentially a “second-order designer,” designing the ecosystem in which the project’s “first-order designers” will work. The work of the Winter Olympics Design Advisory Commit- tee allowed me to refine and formalize the principles of the design curation approach. The process was by no means perfect, but by seeking to become reflexively aware of the design process, I could

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi_a_00592 by guest on 30 September 2021 clearly distinguish between designing the process and designing the product and thus recognized that the design curator’s primary concern should be the former and not the latter. It was very much the complexity of the object to be designed that necessitated this reflexive elaboration of the process—a fourth-order object cannot be conceived the same way as an object of the second or third order. But this is increasingly the kind of object with which designers are required to engage. The lessons learned from the design of the Olympic Games should become part of the designers’ legacy. In the following section, I briefly address how the design curation approach might help realize the ever-more complex role of design in the near future.

The Future The technological touchstones of our coming future—automation, artificial intelligence, Big Data, the internet of things—may not have yet fully asserted their presence in our lives, but they shape the debate on the challenges we are surely to face, both within and without the design world. The Korean design ecosystem is under- going massive changes thanks to prevailing trends toward greater digitization, virtualization, and automation. It is already a world away from the industry I joined at the beginning of my career, which, on the cusp of the digital revolution, was still thoroughly grounded in practical knowhow and still assured of its role in the economy. Between the Seoul Olympics and the PyeongChang Olympics, that certainty has given way to a complex set of challenges that designers must confront if design is to hold any value in the world to come. The design curation approach is not a solution to this problem but an acknowledgment of the complexity of the issues it raises; in effect, it is a tool for exploring and elaborating on this complexity via the recognition that the object of design has evolved. Design curation is thus a set of tools for working with fourth-order design objects. Organizations can create a flexible design management framework that allows effective collaborative project management and maximizes the most appropriate use of design among diverse stakeholders. Corporations can adopt an evolving, multidisciplinary approach in tackling complex projects that might formerly have been the domain of management consulting firms (some of whom have recently started to hire creatives as part of their teams). New types of integrated design consulting services can be created that converge on different forms of expert specializations. To do this, the next step must be to articulate more concrete design curation modules that can be integrated into various types of collaborative projects for governments, education institutions, and corporate design centers. What has been posited and proven over several major projects must be scaled and formalized in such a

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi_a_00592 by guest on 30 September 2021 way that it becomes usable as a methodology without succumb- ing to superficiality or faddishness. Of course, this is always a danger when an industry is faced with uncertainty about its future and yearns for a quick fix to give the appearance of change that obscures a deeper structural stasis. But the design curation approach, as a second-order design methodology, is concerned with structure and not surface. It calls for new roles and new frameworks, not merely cosmetic change. Any tools or methods grounded in this approach would eliminate the possibility of its meaningless application. This concern for structure and fundamentals brings me to one of the biggest challenges for design in Korea (and around the world): the education of the designers of tomorrow. Nowhere is the sea change in attitude more palpable in South Korea than in edu- cational institutions, where a historical emphasis on memorization and rigid structures of seniority is giving way to more cooperative, creative, and collegial forms of learning. Nevertheless, design departments face the task of teaching a generation of designers whose future roles are anything but predictable. The pressing need is therefore to stress the concept of design as form and not only content: design must be taught as a form of practical philosophy for confronting, assimilating, and mitigating complexity. This need was barely felt when I completed my formal education, but its urgency can now hardly be understated. My work on the PyeongChang Olympics gave me the opportunity to take stock of this foundational shift and allowed me to recognize just how far Korean design has evolved in the intervening years since the Seoul Games. Building on these great achievements in the future will depend on making the fullest use of the lessons this progress has to teach us. The economic, sociocultural, technological, and ecological uncertainties of the future demand it.

Acknowledgments I thank Professor Stephen J. Beckett of Hongik University for his many insights during the preparation of this article. I am also grate- ful to Professors Chang In-kyu and Kim Seong-chan, along with all the dedicated designers and experts who served on the design advisory for the 2018 PyeonChang Winter Olympics.

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