Highlights from the 2025 Gwangju Design Biennale 72-Hour Inclusive Design Challenge

As part of the 2025 Gwangju Design Biennale endorsed by World Design Organization, the 72-Hour Inclusive Design Challenge brought together international design students and expert tutors to explore creative, inclusive, and actionable solutions to real-world social issues. Over three days, participants engaged in ideation, prototyping, and public presentations — showcasing how design can foster accessibility, equity, and well-being.

The challenge opened with orientation sessions, keynote dialogues with symposium speakers, and team-based ideation. Each team then identified a core issue related to inclusion, developed design solutions, and produced final prototypes, presentations, and videos, culminating in a public pitch session before a jury of international experts.

Projects

Team Mingle – PATI: Allergy Detection Patch & Communication Code

Addressing the lack of awareness around food allergies, Mingle proposed PATI, a painless microneedle patch and personal allergen code system inspired by MBTI (known as Personality Test of 16 Types). It enables users to easily identify and communicate their allergies using four-letter codes and visual test results, promoting safer, more inclusive dining across language barriers.

Team Kerorro – Reducing Social Stigma for Children of Incarcerated Parents

Focusing on marginalized youth, this team developed a multi-platform campaign to raise awareness and empathy through Instagram stories, school-based events, and public container pop-ups. Their project emphasized social inclusion and breaking stigma through storytelling and interactive engagement.

Team Allways – Rezonanz: Nonverbal Emotional Jewelry

Exploring nonverbal emotional expression, Rezonanz is a wearable that allows users to transmit and receive emotional cues via light and tactile responses. It supports mental well-being and connectedness, particularly across long distances or among people with communication challenges.

Team LOVE LETTER – AI Station for Digitally Underserved Populations

This team proposed a physical AI hub equipped with multi-sensory interfaces for those with low digital literacy. The inclusive station offers educational, emotional, and community support services through tactile, visual, and auditory interactions—bridging the digital divide in public spaces.

Team INCLU5 – EASIP: Accessible Water Bottle Design

EASIP redesigns the everyday water bottle to address overlooked accessibility barriers in grip, twist, and usability. Their inclusive packaging concepts like “Caterpillar,” “Loop,” and “Origami” aim to improve usability for people with limited physical ability, expanding the principles of universal design into consumer goods.

Outcomes

The project successfully fostered cross-cultural collaboration among design students, professional tutors and inclusion experts from around the world, generating research-driven, design-led prototypes aligned with the Biennale’s core theme of inclusive design. In doing so, it strengthened Gwangju’s reputation as a city committed to inclusion, innovation and global design exchange, while demonstrating how empathetic and practical approaches to inclusive design can address needs that are often overlooked.