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Whereas a look at the history of economic growth for Western developed companies generally spans a couple of centuries, a casual glance at economic development in Korea bridges only about 40 years, all taking place in the post-World War II era. Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world, dependent on foreign assistance. Now, Korea is the twelfth-largest economy on the planet.
The life of writer and professor Dong-Sung Cho has neatly spanned those 40 years, leaving him in an ideal position to speculate on the forces contributing to Korea's rise. He fixes on 1961 as the year in which Korea's rebirth began, when General Park Chung Hee, who took power in a military coup in 1961, “dictated a new direction for the future of the Korean economy by making it clear that exports would be the engine behind Korea's economic growth.” Korean companies used their low cost of manpower as a lever to catapult them into the world's low-end textile and footwear markets, mostly serving as subcontractors to their global counterparts.
When financial crisis hit Korea in 1997, foreign creditors grew apprehensive and withdrew their funds, and many of the huge conglomerates, or chaebols, that had sprung up in the previous decade were forced to declare bankruptcy. Some, however, were taken over and restructured according to the “global standard” as prescribed by the International Monetary Fund, and this, according to Cho, gave many of them “first-rate competencies in product development, production, and marketing, so that it was no longer possible to differentiate between them solely on the merits of cost and quality.” Cho sees this as the beginning of the rise of Korea's specialized design firms, which were focused on producing emotionally appealing products, as opposed to cheap but well-made ones. Labor-intensive industries, such as footwear and garments, and capital-intensive industries, such as paper and petrochemicals, saw a significant decline, while technology-intensive industries came to the fore. Large companies in advanced design service industries, such as Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, and Hyundai Motors, reinforced their design departments, and now design is emerging in Korea as one of the most popular disciplines in university education, competing with law, business administration, and medicine.
Cho believes that what is happening now in Korea is a somewhat speeded-up version of the four-stage process he calls “the design revolution.” The first stage-Design Connection-blends traditional analog design tools, such as sketchbooks and triangle rulers, into the digital world of the computer. Design disciplines that were once separate-industrial design, visual communication design, interior design, and architecture, for instance-are slowly merging.
Design Expansion, the second stage, will come along with the desire for newer and more innovative design creations prompted by the economic shift from a supply-side to a consumer-driven market. The visually skilled designer who had previously dominated the design industry will be replaced in importance by the design consumer.
Stage three, Design Application, will see design theories applied to social systems, such as government, military, enterprise, and religious organizations-even families. And stage four, Design Integration, will integrate the results of the first, second, and third revolutions, attempting to design whole societies or organizations.
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