Korean Artists - A Sharing Designer, Bae Sang Min

Bae Sang-min is an industrial designer and also an assosiate professor at KAIST(one of the university of Korea)

The word '3D' that he regards important, stands for 'Dream, Design and Donate'. When Bae attended Parsons School of Design(a private art and design college located in New York City), he had time for introspection, which enabled him to look deep into himself. Young students in their early twenties were made to question themselves about a basic doubt of "who they were". Professors made them query about their lives and come up with an answer all by themselves. Under these kind of circumstances, designer Bae had to find and decide which direction he would make progress toward by himself and for himself with his principles of observing things, writing notes and repeating a process.

Three requirements of a 'Good Design' are said to be 'function, aesthetics and symbol'. Practicing 'share' through ID+IM(ID+IM, a laboratory, which was instituted by Bae and his students, stands for 'I Design Therefore I aM'), designer Bae Sang-min designs his works, which have practical, effective, esthetic sides and sincere stories, for people who have difficulty in living. After reading <I am 3D> and listening to professor Bae's speech, we could have some time to think about what could be the ultimate goal of our life, and how to bring them to real actions through Bae Sang-min's passionate, sharing attitude.

Here is a passage extracted from the book, <I am 3D>.

「There isn't anyone poor enough to share nothing. If you have money, then you can share your money. If you don't, you can share your talent. If you are a person who don't have either, you could share your time. If you don't have money, talent nor time, you could have compassion before anything else.」

Professor Bae is running ID+IM design laboratory in KAIST. (http://idim.kaist.ac.kr/)