Abstract
Since 1993, Korea Institute of Design Promotion has carried out Design Promotion Comprehensive Plan every 4 years and due to the institutes founding purpose the plans are mainly focused on enhancing quality of merchandise goods. However due to social and economic changes now enhancing quality of cultural living through design is becoming important as ever. The purpose of this paper is to find our characteristics and changes in design policies and programs to diffuse design culture in the plans. The researchers have inquired proceeding studies on cultural and design policies and also looked into cases that were carried out in Europe to diffuse design culture. By analyzing EU's Cultural Policies four means were found: Education, Exchange, Participation, and Sharing. The results are as follows. First, in the beginning main focus was to educate people about the importance of design and what good design is, in bureaucratic ways. In the Secondary plan, reaching out to local regions begin to show in order to diffuse design culture that was and still is mainly centered around Seoul. Thirdly plan shows more exchanges but not only limited to domestic regions but international wide. In the Forth plan, participation programs and those engaging design to solve social problems are shown but still not much attention is payed to sharing.