Dahye Kim

Biography

Dahye Kim is a PhD student at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. Her interest in expanding and reorienting her design practice to the realm of socially responsible design led her to initiate the PhD project, which aims to build on the design community's focus on investigating how the quality of democracy is promoted through participatory design practice.

Throughout the PhD project, "Enabling Contestation in London's Multi-Cultural Communities through Agonistic Participatory Design: A Path Towards Inclusive Place Branding", Dahye intends to explore the relationship between contemporary participatory design, place branding and agonistic pluralism. Agonistic pluralism, a model of democracy that aims to embrace diverse perspectives, including contestations, and thus differs from consensus-driven democracy, is applied as a theoretical framework to support her in exploring how to transform conflicts into respectful collaboration inherent in the process of participatory place branding. Currently, contemporary participatory design and place branding have not yet formulated the foundations of their relationships with agonistic democracy. Thus, this practice-led project will investigate to what extent the agonistic participatory design approaches can challenge the critical foundation of inclusive place branding.

In her current PhD project, Dahye has strived to collaborate with New Malden, the largest Korean community in Europe, especially with High Street businesses. Dahye has been questioning and designing a stage for collaboration with the community and will continue to focus on identifying and producing the needs and strategies of the community. Consequently, this practice-led PhD project will focus on responding to a call for design as a democracy by producing agonistic-driven participatory design methods that identify and contest power relations in collaborative place branding practice.