World Design Capital: Passing the Baton to Taipei City

A popular urban transformation movement in the spirit of social design

The Taipei City Government launched the warm-up period for World Design Capital (WDC) 2016 today following the WDC Convocation Ceremony. The completely redesigned WDC Taipei 2016 official website will soon formally go online. The events calendar for 2016 is expected to be formally announced in October 2015.

The Convocation Ceremony on the evening of 18 October was the final official event of Cape Town’s WDC 2014 program. Commissioner Dr. Wei-Gong Liou of Taipei City Government and the WDC Taipei 2016 Office led a group to Cape Town to attend the ceremony. Witnessed by Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille and 170 invited guests from the global design community, Dr. Brandon Gien, President of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (Icsid), formally presented the WDC Commemorative Plaque to Commissioner Liou.

Commissioner Liou said: “Over the last two years, since we began the application process to host WDC 2016, Taipei City’s efforts to embed design-led thinking into the public policy formulation of city government departments have given rise to many innovative proposals. At the same time, the enthusiastic response of locally based designers has helped our citizens to jointly explore ways to make our city a better place. We have discovered that through a combination of design, government resources and private-sector participation, we are gradually changing the face of Taipei City, and also changing people’s ways of thinking. This is a positive development. We hope that in the coming two years we can continue to push these efforts forward, to enable Taipei City to continually improve and change, and to truly become a people-oriented Adaptive City.”

In order to present the spirit and focus of Taipei’s coming tenure as World Design Capital 2016 to the international guests and the world’s media, the Taipei City Government organized a special pavilion on the theme of “WDC Taipei 2016 – Adaptive City” at the Design House Exhibition in Cape Town. The exhibits showcase Taipei City’s unique social design projects, enabling exhibition visitors to appreciate the difficulties experienced by various public service users, and to understand the improved designs.

The handover symbolizes that the international spotlight of WDC will from now on be focused on Taipei City. The carefully planned program of WDC Taipei 2016 will include many major international design events as well as activities for participation by international and local people.