DesigningLearningSpaces
Education 303X

NABC for New Songdo Project #1

New Song-Do, a completely wired city built from the ground up in South Korea, affords the opportunity to bring newcomers together—Korean and non-Korean—into a participatory learning environment.

NEED. The transfer of cultural knowledge between community members provides a key opportunity to promote collaborative learning experiences (Michalchik, 1997). Furthermore, the prevalence of technology requires that people learn how to effectively use these tools to become ‘legitimate participants’ in society (Lave & Wenger, 1991).

The first need is to maintain and spread traditional Korean Culture to Korean nationals. The second need is to create a sense of community in an international city that is 10% Korean and 90% international residents.

APPROACH. To flesh out our approach, our group will solicit opinions from focus group participants, New Song-do personnel and members of the Stanford community. Possible approaches include:

• Design learning into the Cultural Center
• Scavenger Hunt designed to evoke interest in some of the city’s treasures.
• Visitors get a small disposable digital camera then follow a guided tour around the city taking pictures. at the end of the day they return to the cultural center where the turn in their camera and their pictures are made into an album which they can take with them. Album would have captions with pictures that has a description of the cultural importance of the location. This could also be done in conjunction with the scavenger hunt.
• Meeting with and talking to local business people.
• Signage designed to display Korean culture and provide information about the city.

BENEFITS. The benefits to our client our as followed:

• interest in and opportunity for long-term learning (through photo album activity).
• a culturally aware/interested international population that the local population will be more willing to open up their community to.
• a Korean population that is more informed about their heritage
• a positive reputation for New Songdo as a vehicle to pass on Korean culture to both Koreans and non-Koreans that increases traffic and economic growth in their city
• a multicultural community

COMPETITION. Our competition is other cosmopolitan cities around the world. In Korea there is a lot of information accessible through a cell phone, so in order for this info to be effective it will need to be easily accessible and interesting for the consumer.

Our key competitive advantage within Korea is that right now, there is no place to learn about all of Korean culture. Korean culture is now segmented by Region and Time (Old vs. New). Our product will be a one stop shop for anyone who wants to learn about all of Korean culture; the only other way is to meet w/ older people (difficult for the average person to do and older people may not know traditions that are 500 years old), read older books (boring, hard to do, limited by language if there is only a Korean version), or travel to many locations (expensive and time consuming)