Does favorite design lead to good design? Taxi design competitions in Istanbul and New York city

The changes in both urban and national bureaucracy over the last few decades have been described as a shift from “government” to “governance” or as a move from the “old government” to “new governance” (Kjaer, 2009, p. 138). A shift in the public affairs from old public management to the new public management has reasoned the emergence of pluralism and open-discussion platforms into the public tradition, which has also triggered a new paradox: The challenge of pluralism. Although pluralism is an essential ingredient of participation, it accommodates difficulties. The society consists of a huge diversity of different social, cultural, anthropological and emotional attachments. We have different moral codes. When our design ideas compete, so do our values and societal commitments. We recognise those tensions in the rival claims of ideology, ethnicity, gender, religion and locality (Bellamy, 1999, p. 1). Within this article the struggle between the searches for good design vs. popular phenomena is being questioned out of Istanbul and New York City’s (NYC) taxi design competitions’ methodologies and results. Experiences revealed from both case studies prove that the challenge between the popular taste and search for good design may not always promote either design itself or the promoter.