The Unusual Suspects Festival Seoul:
Fostering a city-wide connections for social change
CREATIVE DIRECTION / EVENTS PLANNING / SOCIAL IMPACT
As a Service Designer at Social Innovation Exchange (SIX), I supported the creative direction, events planning and content strategy of The Unusual Suspects Festival in Seoul, a city-wide event focused on unlikely connections for social change. In collaboration with two academic institutions, I also organized and facilitated a workshop exploring the topic: “How can artificial intelligence strengthen human relationships?” (click here to view the same workshop hosted in London in June 2018).
Date
June – Nov 2018
Role
Service Designer
Responsibilities
Workshop facilitation, events planning, UX design, creative direction, brand/identity design
Tools
Google Suite, Adobe XD, InVision
Overview
What is the Unusual Suspects Festival?
The Unusual Suspects Festival is a unique set of collaborative events, hosted by different organizations from a variety of sectors, across different venues in a city. It is a platform to bring together all voices in society to craft solutions to some of society’s most pressing challenges. Through an unusual mix of voices and collaborators, we can empower ourselves, challenge each other to reframe and rethink the way we live, work and collaborate. All events at the festival are open and free to attend.
Why Seoul?
When Wonsoon Park became the Mayor of Seoul 6 years ago, we co-curated SIX Summer School with Seoul Metropolitan Government, Seoul Institute and Hope Institute, bringing together 400 people to explore how cities such as Seoul can support civic and social innovation. And since then, the city government has fostered social innovation across Seoul, successfully positioning itself as a “social innovation city” globally.
While the scale of activities and events have grown, there was a growing concern that the actors and organisations part of the social innovation movement stayed disconnected. Our partners, C. and Seoul Innovation Park wanted to bring The Unusual Suspects Festival to Seoul to connect different parts of the social innovation ecosystem and bring diversity to the conversations.
COMMENT FROM PAST PARTNER
“The conversations and events I’ve been involved in have given me the confidence to speak about and present how I want my project to fit into the regeneration that is happening in Roehampton.”
– Orode Faka (Roehampton R.O.C.K.S.)
