Design Can Do (DCD) is an organization founded in 2012, to provide a social innovation tool using design methodologies in a workshop platform where professionals from various disciplines can contribute to the development of their society through design thinking. The project aims to change the false notion that design is an exclusive activity mainly applied to beautify and develop commercial goods. Design Can Do has hosted workshops in Seoul, Korea and in Cape Town, South Africa in 2012, to show that design methods can be applied to social problems and to facilitate locals of the area to take ownership of their society to come up with real solutions themselves.

We wanted the methods used in the DCD workshops to reflect three key points as a method of social innovation. One, that design can do so much. Design can emote, help, better, communicate, refine, connect, strengthen, the list is endless. Second, to show that these design processes can take all sorts of different forms, frameworks, and orders to suit the challenge at hand. The last was to communicate that the this process can be used in all kinds of contexts to hold different types of content, be that a theme or location of the challenge or the people involved.

As is implied by the hexagons used in DCD’s brand identity1 , DCD plans to tesselate and grow by sharing knowledge and empowering people. A Design Can Do workshop follows the style of a hackathon2 where a variety of creative types gather for a short fixed amount of time to collaborate and share ideas to act as a positive stimuli for each other. The workshop lasts for 36 hours with 36 participants going through 6 phases of a design process. Each participant is given a toolkit and manual to be used throughout the workshop. The process and methods included in the manual are designed and edited by DCD with the intent that it will be accessible and easily adaptable by people from a wide range of disciplines—a plug and play platform for solving problems. With this manual we wanted to not only guide people through the workings of a DCD workshop but also to encourage and inform them to organize and host such workshops themselves in the future. 2.

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DESIGN CAN DO A PLATFORM FOR CHANGEMAKES

CoFounder / Director Jiwon Park and Yoon Bahk

www.designcando.orginfo@designcando.org

A Platform for Change -Makers

Design Can Do provides a workshop platform where a group of multidisciplinary professionals are enabled to contribute to the development of their society through design. The participants of each DCD workshop—comprised of local professionals from a range of disciplines—experience a hackathon-style design process over a weekend, tackling local social problems. The goal of a DCD workshop is to come up with practical real world solutions, but DCD’s top level aim is to equip the participants with DCD toolkits, manuals and guide them through an experience to become change-makers, themselves, who can spread the potential power of design thinking.

Problem solving is useful when there is a defined problem to be solved, but what about when the problems are undefined and complex? Solving such wicked problems are not easy with a conventional linear thinking process. Often, by the time you come up with a well resolved answer, the initial problem has already changed or shifted. Hence, a design methodology of thinking through doing is better suited for tackling complex, systemic social issues as it looks for opportunities rather than for shortsighted answers; yielding a process that allows for a quicker materialization of ideas.Recently, design thinking has become a hot topic, seen popping up in trendy business magazines and discussed in academic institutions around the world. However, first hand experience with design thinking within the academic or business consulting sector comes at a high cost. Outside of these segments, design thinking is still a foreign concept, especially in the public sector, perhaps where it is needed most. Our goal was to make such knowledge accessible and readily available to anyone who

WHAT

WHO

WHY

HOW

WHEN

WHERE

Intensive workshop to find social solution

Practica Sustainable Innovative

Diverse global locations

with local people, using local resources to solve local problem

30+6 Hrs weekend workshop

6-Hr on Friday 30-Hr on Saturday & Sunday

Multidisciplinary professionals

Business / Engineering Science / Humanities Social Science / Art

Using design thinking

Problem Solving System Thinking Creative Process

Create behavior change and social impact

DCD @ CAPE TOWN36-HOUR WORKSHOP FOR SOCIAL IMPACT

Are you passionate about social design? Are you a keen participant?Do you believe Design Can Do?

WORKSHOP Call for 36 participants

Friday, 23 Nov. 6pm — 12pmSaturday, 24 Nov. 9am — Sunday, 25 Nov. 5pm

Cape Peninsula University of Technology2F 80 Roeland Street, Cape Town 8000, South Africa

SEMINAR Open to all

Monday, 26 Nov. 5 — 7pmVenue: TBA

CALL FOR APPLICANTSPassionate professionals across disciplines all welcome! — no cost to you!

Application forms at www.designcando.org

Please send us your application before midnight, 11th November to capetown@designcando.org

SOCIAL INTEGRATION AT THE FRINGEThe area is known as an innovation district and is positioned to be Africa’s up-and-coming environment for design, media and ICT innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship. An urban laboratory in which to test design solutions to our foremost urban challenges.

Organized by Design Can Do + Rock City Foundation

Sponsored by Korea Institute of Design Promotion Korean Ministry of Knowledge Economy

6+ 30 36-HOUR

WORKSHOP FOR SOCIAL IMPACT

www.designcando.org

2012 8 31 6 pm -12 pm

( 532-12 3 )

2012 9 1 9 am - 2 6 pm

( 283)

2012 9 3 3 pm ( 532-12 3 )

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8 24

36 (30 maximizers + 6 Catalyst)

Design Can Do www.designcando.org

eubinne@seouldesign.or.kr

02-2096-0113 / jhbae@seouldesign.or.kr

SEOUL DESIGN FOUNDATIONGLOBAL DESIGN TREND ACADEMY

DESIGN CAN

City of Seoul

SDF (Seoul Design Foundation) / DCD (Design Can Do)

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was interested in making a positive social impact using a design-driven approach.

Design Can Do is a workshop platform designed to deliver practical solutions suited to regional environments that leave a strong legacy for those involved to not only carry on developing their outcomes all the way to implementation but also to adopt this method of design thinking into their lives and to spread it further, ultimately making DCD a creative tool used for social change.

DCD 6+30 Toolkit and Manual

A unique offering of a DCD workshop is that each participant is given a DCD toolkit3 and a manual4 . The toolkit includes stationary as well as two sets inspiration5 and lateral thinking cards6 that facilitate creative problem solving throughout the fast paced workshop. The DCD workshop manual contains comprehensive information on how DCD was initiated, the methodologies used in the workshop and the how-to’s for each phase of the workshop to not only guide the participants at times during the workshop but also for each of them to use as a reference when they want to adopt such a way of thinking in their own practice. This complimentary toolkit and manual are specifically designed with a strong brand sensitivity to help form a community of Design Can Do’ers.

DCD 6+30 Workshop Program

There are several key factors that were designed specifically to leave a strong legacy and a sense of ownership in the people who take part so that they can carry on developing their outcomes of the workshop to make it a reality, and to enable them to become initiators to such social change. First, in order to attract voluntary participation of professionals, we made sure that each event is held on a weekend to make it easy to take part in; and second, the subject that was dealt in the workshops are something that is very much a local issue.

The Design Can Do project, as a series of workshops, is a work in progress. In August 2012, DCD held its pilot workshop in Seoul, Korea and then launched its official first workshop in Cape Town, South Africa. Each DCD workshop started with a local partner at a specific location. For the pilot workshop, Seoul Design Foundation approached us and our location was Seoul by default, and they had a few briefs that were crowd sourced by the citizens of Seoul. On the other hand, for our workshop in South Africa we found an interested partner who had strong connections with Cape Town and we refined a brief together with them.

A DCD workshop lasts 36 hours over a weekend, kicking off on Friday 6pm for the first 6 hours then for 30 hours going from Saturday morning at 9am to 3pm on Sunday. We had to contain the workshop within the weekend, so that it didn’t get in the way of work for participants, but at the same time we had to make sure that there was enough time to go through a design thinking process and development; enough so that the final outcomes were not just a series of discussions, but became visible, physical ideas. As a result, the DCD workshops ended up having a rather unusual and intense timetabling of 6 + 30 hours.

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joined by 36 participants: 6 “Catalysts”7 and 30 “Maximizers.”8

Catalysts who are briefed in detail prior to the start of the workshop, take on the role of leaders of a group at times, or act as facilitators for shorter sessions. The Maximizers are the brains of each workshop and they were carefully selected from a list of applicants to allow professionals from various disciplines to work together.

6 Phases of the DCD Workshop

A DCD workshop program has 6 phases: Initiate, Inspire, Distill, Ideate, Develop and Disseminate. In the first 6 hours of the workshop the participants form groups of 6 (1 Catalyst and 5 Maximizers) to initiate the workshop, with a quick ice breaking exercise, a mini PechaKucha9 and dives straight into getting inspired. The Inspire phase may involve doing some quick design research, or discussing what they already know about the subject area or doing a quick site visit of the relevant area.

On Saturday morning the participants get reshuffled into new groups of 6 to cross-pollinate the inspiration from the night before and start the Distill Phase, which is all about distilling the right kind of questions that will spark off new ideas easily, from the inspiration that’s been gathered. Starting from these questions the groups will go into brainstorming numerous ideas in a structured manner, then to map it to identify a strong idea suitable for development. The group then goes into a long period of development of each idea to present it to a panel of judges for dissemination at the end of the workshop. At the end of each workshop we held an open seminar on the following Monday of the weekend to share the outcomes to the public and to gather more interest in further development.

Design Thinking as a Means for Social Change

A DCD workshop achieves its goal of becoming an experience that would showcase design thinking as a means for social change in two ways:

First, Each workshop has its own, unique brief, tackling local social issues that have been chosen in deliberation with the local partners of the event. Within the 36 hours of each workshop, 6 applicable ideas are born at the start of their development, ready to make a change. DCD’s role is to expose the participants to a fast paced design thinking process to get to this stage and to build the bridges with local government and stakeholders, in addition to the local partners for the event so that the participants can tap into this resource, if they wish to continue developing their ideas further.

Second, DCD workshop as a series, is about knowledge sharing, and to spread a new way of thinking and a new process that can be adapted for problem solving. To quote a Maximizer from the Cape Town workshop,

“This whole process has changed every individual that has been a part of this workshop. It’s definitely changed the way that I think, about the Fringe, it’s definitely change the way I think about how I live my life.”

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