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 .
H. Lee (Mon,) studied this question.