The Emblem

The IFAC symbol is a feedback loop. An arrow runs across the top and returns through the circle below it, the elementary picture of closed-loop control and the discipline the federation was founded to advance. To Koreans, this looks like the Korean letter ㅎ, as in 한국 (Korea). The 2008 Seoul Congress was built on that happy coincidence. To it the designers added the sangmo, the ribboned hat worn in Korean folk performance, whose long white streamer the dancer spins overhead in wide arcs while turning. That streamer became the curved band sweeping above the wordmark, rising from the small spiral at the upper left where the ribbon coils, and it carried the red and blue of the national flag.

IFAC redesigned its symbol in 2014, so the loop drawn today is not quite the one Seoul worked with. Set the two side by side and the differences are easy to find. The circle is larger, its opening sits differently, and the arrowhead is more pronounced. The Busan emblem follows the current form.

The emblem of the 23rd IFAC World Congress was selected through a student design competition organized by ICROS. It keeps what Seoul established: the loop remains, the spiral remains, and IFAC with the year still sits above the host city name. What changes belongs to the new host: the single ribbon has become three waves, for the blue sky and the blue sea of Busan, a city that has always faced the water. The palette has moved from the red and blue of the flag to the blue and orange of IFAC, the loop now rendered in the federation's own orange.

Colors taken from the federation, a form inherited from Seoul and reshaped for a new host by a new generation of Korean students. The emblem holds tradition and change together in one, which is how we interpret sustainability.