Centring Relationships More than Humans and Things: Translating Design through the Culture of the Far East

Throughout the development of design, while design has expanded widely beyond western societies, relatively limited knowledge from non-western cultures has been explored. For both having inclusive understanding of design and turning a monologue into an interactive dialogue, different cultural perspectives need to be embraced. Thus, with four cases in diverse design subfields from South Korea, this study projects a possibility to incorporate a perspective from East Asian culture.

While the traditional approach to design was centralised on 'things', human-centredness has recently challenged the perspective. With a lens of Korean culture, more contemporary discussions on design, including activism, decolonisation and post-anthropocentrism, can be seen as an effort to recognise hidden or forgotten relationships in design beyond thing- and human-centred design, relationship-centred design in other words. From the context of South Korea, the ways in which the relationship is considered in relation to design are introduced for initiating more active conversations between cultures. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future studies and implications to the field.