Hwasu Pier, Reimagined Seven Ways: A Local Rebranding Project at Design Factory Korea

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Design Factory Korea (DFK) is an open innovation platform where industry and education meet to solve real-world problems together. Under the slogan "Designing Future Innovation," students learn by stepping out of the classroom and into the field. This semester, that problem-based learning philosophy played out on one of Incheon's oldest waterfronts.

In Professor Bokyung Lee's "Local Regeneration Design Project” at Yonsei University's Underwood International College (UIC), run together with DFK, international students spent a semester rebranding Hwasu Pier (화수부두) in Incheon. As a member of the Design Factory Global Network (DFGN), DFK brought together students from many countries — and their diverse perspectives became the driving force in seeing a familiar port with fresh eyes.

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A class that began on the docks

The course took on Hwasu Pier, an urban-regeneration innovation district, challenging multinational student teams to tackle the area's social and industrial problems through design.

Students started not at their desks but in the alleys of the port. Through expert lectures, field visits, interviews with local merchants and residents, and case studies, they uncovered insights, generated ideas, and built prototypes they tested on-site — the hands-on, learn-by-doing spirit that defines DFK. Seven teams of 35 students each read Hwasu Pier in their own way.

The project was carried out as part of the 2026 Urban Regeneration Education Program, supported by the Incheon Urban Regeneration Center and run in collaboration with the Dong-gu Urban Regeneration Center.

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Seven teams, seven Hwasu Piers

Facing the same waterfront, the students arrived at strikingly different answers:

• Harbor of Lights — a "port of light" that brightens the dark waterfront with a three-stage nighttime lighting scheme
• Pier 703 — a "703" brand identity that reimagines the declining docks as a waterfront market
• Ground Signage System — wayfinding signs rendered in brass by day and LED by night
• Stamps — a stamp tour connecting six landmarks across Hwasu Pier
• Bringing History to Light — miniatures recreating three eras, paired with a QR oral-history archive of dock workers' voices
• Immersive Dining — an immersive dining concept combining a fishing-net archive with holograms
• Hwasu Dockside Market — an interactive proposal reviving the former Iljin Electric factory site as a market and cultural space

Light, wayfinding, memory, and even cuisine — each team reshaped a different texture of Hwasu Pier into its own brand.

Beyond the classroom, into an exhibition

As DFK projects tend to do, these outcomes didn't stay in the classroom. The students' Hwasu Pier rebranding work was exhibited and presented at "The City Center of INCHEON: Urban Regeneration," the results-sharing exhibition of the 2026 Urban Regeneration Education Program (June 9–19, 2026, Baengnyeon-ieum, 2F), where it was shared directly with local government officials and community stakeholders.

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A pier that people once passed by without a second glance became, through the eyes of these international students, a place worth returning to. Solving a community's real problems with students' own hands — this is exactly where the future innovation DFK envisions begins.