Programming

Theme: Adaptive City – Design in Motion

“Adaptive City – Design in Motion” is Taipei City’s core appeal in hosting World Design Capital 2016. How can Taipei City apply innovative “design thinking” to overcome the constraints that limited resources place on the city’s development, to pursue continual renewal and change in their urban governance, to create happiness in the lives of their citizens, to bring citizens a better quality of life in a livable city, and to create a forward-looking city with design vision? These are the goals and directions that Taipei City is constantly thinking about and seeking progress toward.

Design Thinking

The introduction of “design thinking” is an important tool in Taipei’s urban transformation and planning. Design is not only about outward appearance, styling and aesthetics. It is also a systematic method of analyzing issues and solving problems. Old ways of thinking about policymaking and governance are no longer adequate to meet today’s challenges. In the future, the city will need more cross-disciplinary dialogue to guide them in addressing the newly emerging challenges of urbanization and globalization. When design thinking is extended into the realm of urban planning and becomes deeply embedded in the city, it will become a power that nourishes Taipei and drives its development.

Colour: Purple

The design of the WDC Taipei 2016 logo features a structured intersection of a latitude line and a longitude line, symbolizing a combination of rationality and emotion, and locating the coordinates of the livable city of Taipei among international cities. The brightly beaming cross-shaped star of light at the center meanwhile represents a lodestar guiding the city’s future development, with Taipei City as its core spirit, developing comprehensively in all directions, transforming the power of design into living cells for urban regeneration and, through the power of design participation, injecting a richer innovative vitality, and giving rein to the city’s greatest environmental values.

As World Design Capital for 2016, Taipei has chosen purple as its signature color. Purple is created by blending red, yellow and blue: red for vitality and enthusiasm, yellow for cultural and creative activities, and blue for smart technologies, with the dual charm of being richly both unrestrained and elegant. It symbolizes Taipei as a design capital that has emerged from both cultural and human development and advanced science and technology, and fully symbolizes the city’s diverse development and constant striving for improvement.

Key Development Areas

Within the WDC theme of “Adaptive City – Design in Motion,” the development issues that Taipei faces today can be distilled into four strands: “Life Quality and Health,” “Ecological Sustainability,” “Urban Regeneration” and “Smart Living.” As well as inviting passionate design professionals to take part in policymaking discussions, the city government is also putting on a series of courses in design thinking for city officials, in the hope that by embracing “social design” thinking, Taipei can bring an innovative spirit to urban governance.

Citizen Participation

By cultivating modern citizens who are able to solve problems and practice design thinking can be a driving force to promote a city’s continual readjustment and evolution. Through the spirit of “social design,” Taipei hopes to let design become truly embedded in citizens’ lives, and to enable them to become creative seeds for communities, schools, and business districts, and actively push forward urban innovation. Through the joint participation of designers, city residents, and experts from different fields, Taipei aim to realize the vision of a better quality of life and to turn Taipei into a livable city and a new role model for urban development.