From Everyday Life to Civic Participation
Municipality of Everyday Politics began with a question that emerged during South Korea’s political crisis following the declaration of martial law: what can a designer do before the next political crisis happens? Rather than focusing on political events themselves, the project began by exploring how politics is experienced through everyday life. Through conversations about family, neighbourhoods, work, housing, and public services, it sought to uncover how broader political structures quietly shape everyday experiences.
From Conversation to Participation
The project initially invited participants to talk about their everyday experiences, which led to question cards connecting personal experiences to broader political structures. These conversations developed into a podcast and later into an installation inspired by the departments of Eindhoven Municipality, where visitors responded to questions about housing, public transport, energy, public space, and community life. A conversation with a visitor then shifted the project’s focus: if opportunities for participation already exist, why do so many citizens still feel unheard? This question led the project to examine not only how citizens participate, but how participation itself is designed and experienced.
Reimagining Civic Communication
As a mobile civic office, the project now experiments with how everyday administrative communication might become an invitation to dialogue. Through speculative exercises and participatory encounters, visitors are invited to rethink familiar public documents and imagine alternative relationships between citizens and institutions. Rather than redesigning documents only as visual objects, the project asks what kinds of behaviours, conversations, and forms of civic agency they could enable.
