Namkyu Chun: I am not a urbanist and trained as a fashion designer. However, while exposing myself into diverse professional and academic communities, I found that both practices share many similarities. If fashion design is a field that deals with spaces on top of human skin, urban designers or urbanists work with spaces on top of ground. The difference in scale matters, but I argue that both fields are spatial design that has to embrace complex multilayered relationships of physically and emotionally sensible factors. As Ian Hodder refers in his book Entanglement, accumulation of this diverse mix of entanglements, or relationships, generates bigger and stronger opportunities. In other words, if practitioners of both fields become more aware of the relationships that surround them, they will begin to see more potential by reconnecting existing relationships. To explore the promising future, the role of both practitioners has to be redefined in active dialogues with other communities, and I strongly believe TRULAB offers a great perspective to rethink what we see now. NC
Source: Namkyu Chun