Rehabilitating the ‘material’ in communicative planning: Design thinking with schoolchildren in Seoul

This paper engages with the ‘material turn’ in planning to interpret the epistemological potential of incorporating design methods into communicative planning. It argues that user-centred design methods can help overcome persistent shortcomings of the communicative approach by opening up more inclusive and action-oriented pathways for collective reasoning, while addressing structural injustices implicit in the assumption of communicative rationality. Using a documentary research method, the paper analyses five school-based planning projects in Seoul, South Korea. After discussing how design-driven deliberations reshaped communicative rationality, it conceptualises ‘empathy’, ‘plurality’, and ‘procedural justice’ as epistemo-ethical capacities that design methods can introduce into communicative practice, and emphasises how their exploratory, iterative, and lateral structures—unlike the serial unfolding typical of argumentation—can foster collective thinking and spatio-temporal rhythms that are conducive to what Habermas sought through his notion of intersubjective understanding .