“Dongdaemun” means a “Big easten gate”. The gate was established in east side of Hanyang(ancient name of Seoul) fortress in 1396. There held the most popular market. When market opened, people were gathered, buying fresh food, watching performances and playing. It had been a exciting place for 530 years.

In 1926, During japanese colonical period, fotress walls were destroyed by city planning. On the place where fortress and places of historic interest were demolished, the Dongdaemun Stadiums were built for the celebration of Japanese prince’s wedding.

In December 2007, Stadiums were demolished and DDP construction was started. It has a beautiful shapes, comfortable spaces and creative contents. DDP is expected to recall nostalgic memories of old exciting market and playing and to maintain welfare value as a leading service design district of the city.

I suggest that you visit DDP(http://ddp.seoul.go.kr/eng/) to know a attempt of creating beautiful,comfortable spaces that encourage play, health and well-being to our citizen. Seoul metropolitan government will open DDP in 2014.

Link submitted on behalf of Dr. Richard Jackson by Dale Bell, Executive Producer/Director Designing Healthy Communities http://designinghealthycommunities.org

I understand that there is no lack of good Design today, but that there is a shortage of Resources and Customers to bring them to life. To access resources and “customers,” a need for so many good causes, again and again I find myself saying that we must make the values and actions we seek “fashionable”—i.e. to become something that everyone decides they want to have, to make or do…

In science education, we are promoting scientific inquiry, its products, and technology design fashionable by engaging everyone in them. As a science educator, I try to illuminate how and why a useful understanding of how the world works, within and around us, can promote actions to help them work better—i.e.healthier. Following this Conversation, I will be including a useful understanding of the technologies of healthy and beautiful spaces within definitions of technological and environmental literacy. This is, at least, one way to advance support for improved human-made environments.

At the New York Hall of Science we promote a science and technology literacy that includes healthful living as our building and playground are within a space that is beautiful , comfortable and encourages play. Clearly, such educational, media and public relations strategies must be employed throughout all our communities, as publications referred to by Joyce Lee suggest, to achieve the “fashion” for healthy, beautiful human-made spaces so badly needed by academic, industrial, governmental and residential communities.

Prerequisites of minimum air quality performance, environmental tobacco smoke control, minimum acoustic performance, separate credits for daylight and for quality views, credits for avoidance and disclosure of chemicals of concern, PBT source reduction, low emitting interiors, and acoustic performance.

The synergy between green and health is becoming ever more evident in a green building rating system intending to mainstream practice. Hope everyone takes a look at what is installed for the industry in the near future.

Closer to home, I hope you will continue to find the book I coauthored useful, Active Design Guidelines (www.nyc.gov/adg). In addition to the NYC Department of Parks’ High Performance Landscape Guidelines mentioned earlier, the Department of Transportation has the Street Design Manual (http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/about/streetdesignmanual.shtml) and the Department of City Planning published the NYC Comprehensive Waterfront Plan (http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/pdf/cwp/vision2020_nyc_cwp.pdf). They are all great read. If design excellence is the underlying tenor of these publications, we hope that more mental health professionals could study how design could improve the life, health and well-being of citizens in the future.

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With this mind stretching conversation, I come away with new insights that we all have critical roles to play (no pun intended) for our next generation to enjoy this healthy environment where well-being is a priority. A few guests have missed the Conversation deadline but their work is of note: The Transparency Website http://transparency.perkinswill.com/default.cshtml?url=/ and the World Design Capital this year in Helsinki has several newly drawn projects with themes in health and well-being http://www.worlddesigncapital.com/world-design-capitals/current-capital-helsinki/

Traditional office ergonomics focuses on the interaction between the individual worker, and their desk and technology. The emphasis of this approach is to reduce the risk of injury due to improper positioning or design of the physical features.

This approach grew out from the massive introduction of computers into offices in the 1980s. The primary work style was individual, heads down,static postures in which workers were seated for long periods in front of the computer. This work style was required because the computer and telephone were fixed elements in the office.

Fast forward a few decades and we see that the typical work style has evolved from primarily “heads down,” to a more collaborative,casual mode of work that occurs in a wide variety of locations and types of work settings. We call this “distributed work.” (see http://www.knoll.com/research/downloads/WP_DistributedWork.pdf)

New portable technologies have freed people from long stints alone at their workstation.

The practice of traditional office ergonomics has lagged behind this reality, assuming most work still occurs by individuals seated alone at their desk. Office ergonomics has to evolve into a more holistic approach that broadens from a focus on the individual at the desk, to a more collaborative work model in which people are interacting in a wide variety of locations and types of work spaces.

While holistic ergonomics is concerned with maintaining a healthy, safe workplace, it recognizes the collaborative, social, distributed nature of work and the need to optimize planning approaches, and work spaces, to help people and groups be more productive.

For more information see http://www.knoll.com/research/downloads/wp_HolisticErgonomics.pdf

What will it take to get children and families to use parks and open spaces? I’m a pediatrician in Stamford working on childhood obesity, and I know that providing healthy nutrition is half the battle. The other half is getting children physically active. Our parks are beautiful but empty – why are so many children indoors? The rate of crimes against children has remained about the same for the past 44 years, yet the culture where children went out to play and returned when it got dark, has mostly disappeared. Has the news media done such a good job of scaring us? Is the time spent online and on Television to blame?

In Stamford we have a program called KIDS’FANS (Kids Fitness and Nutrition Services) http://www.stamfordhospital.org/kidsfans that teaches children about nutrition and physical activity. We serve many children and have good results. The program provides the tools to make lifestyle modifications. The challenge is how to incorporate physical activity into lifestyles after the twelve week program is over.

I’m hoping this question can be solved by the 34 agency coalition in Stamford. They have created community gardens in all the schools and in the community. Restaurants offer healthy kids’ menus during restaurant week and some restaurants do it all year round. Childcare learning centers serve healthier menus. And yet, we still do not use the parks.

We do come together for our children. For example, we have neighborhood watches and carpools, can we not then watch over each other’s children to give them a carefree childhood? Somehow we need to use the parks and entice the children outside for their current and future health and wellbeing.

Global economy changed the design landscape entirely as we all know. What was intriguing was to see how LEED and Economy worked together to force Green, Health, and Playful design in commercial spaces.

The economic climate forced everyone to be more productive with limited resources, whether it being real estate, materials or labor, every design trade was challenged to do more with less. Green design, which was considered almost as noble and luxurious cause only for certain crowd, suddenly came to play as the resolution for this new design challenge.

Using glass interior partitions or coming out of the private offices to an open desk environment, became explosively popular for their merit of being able to provide more with less; same for the solar roof or increased natural ventilation. This is a trend not just in New York but I see in Korea and other Asian countries as well.

Philip Johnson perhaps knew all this without having to go through what we all went through past a few years. We admire and aspire his glass house design and creativity, but with out recent awakening, we can appreciate the true beauty even more…..

I am struck by a few things in the conversation. First of all, in many important ways, most of the spaces that we all live in are not designed by a person, but by a community and a process. New York, Queens, the neighborhood I work in, Flushing Meadows Corona Park seem to me to be the result of a complicated play of history, individuals, politics, community needs, etc. And some of the worst urban design we have seen in history has been the result of the imposition of top-down design principles and processes based upon the idea that the community must be educated about what makes good design.

So I think we should be careful about assuming the challenge is to educate bureaucrats, policy makers, designers, or the public about what makes good design. I am too much of a layperson in this field to know whether this group of 8 posters here can agree on what makes good design, but if this field is like my work, 8 people have 9 opinions about what makes good design.

I always found that the urban neighborhoods in which I felt most alive and healthy were the ones in which design was least conspicuous, that the design emerges from the life of the community. Queens is a fascinating example. On one level it is about as bad an urban design as could be imagined. History, Robert Moses (the *other* Moses!), and the transportation infrastructure have made this a confusing and disjointed borough. On a more granular level, communities like Astoria, LIC, Sunnyside, not to mention more established areas like St Albans, Forest Hills, and Flushing, are as alive, busy, and thriving as anywhere in NYC. These neighborhoods are flourishing despite the lack of obvious design.

THat said, there is a lot of design thinking even where it is not obvious, in zoning, in transport, in schools, and in parks. So the fact is that these energetic communities can only thrive in the context of a set of subtler and more pervasive design strategies. And as this group knows far better than I, these less conspicuous designs are the product of complicated social interactions and political forces.

I know that Charles and Susan in particular have left a strong and benevolent mark on NYC life during their long and fruitful careers. And when I have had the opportunity to work with them, I have been struck by their capacity to listen and massage complicated situations into cohesive approaches. So maybe the point of this post is that good design comes as much from listening and being educated as it does from educating others.