The Final Straw documentary team in Korea (aka, Suhee and Patrick) needed a place to set up camp in Seoul, and for a while it seemed like we were out of luck in terms of finding cheap, shared office space here.
It’s not as if we didn’t have amazing people trying to help out, fellow artists and filmmakers gave us great bucket lists, offered up their spaces when we needed them, and even the wonderful gallery curator, Sehee Park of PlaceMAK, offered up her apartment for use during the day — we took her up on the offer for a few days, too!
But we still were in need of an openly available and ideally, social space… something like the co-working spaces that are popping up in the U.S. and Europe. But word from just about everyone here was that the idea of such a space hadn’t caught on in Korea…
…that is, until just this week. Literally.
Space Noah, a brand new co-working space started by Dr. Noah was still putting the finishing touches on their ‘media lab’ when we arrived for a tour last Tuesday. After seeing their beautiful facilities, hearing about their mission to be a ‘base camp for social innovators,’ and meeting with some of the team members, we were sold. We started working at Space Noah on Wednesday morning.
The space is part of a project for ‘social change’ in Korea, and around the world. As such, the current group of people who have made Space Noah their office come from pretty diverse backgrounds, from photographers to educational pioneers to programmers. But one of the really cool parts of this — besides the fact that nothing of this kind existed in Korea even a month ago — is the doctor who started it all.
Dr. Noah runs a dental clinic? on the second floor of the building, and dedicates the third and fourth floors to his social innovation operation, where new ideas for social progress are nurtured by him and his staff. What!?
This place is rad, and I intend to do a write up on this man for Sociecity in the near future…
Really cool Patrick!