Borders&Boundaries[Idea+Research+Target Audience]

[Initial Idea]

As usual, I drew the mind map when I got the brief of borders&boundaries project. In the mind map, keyword I liked and chose was glasses. Because I thought glasses can have two meaning of borders, one is just a border itself to see everything clearly and another is a means to see the border, which can be the social/politic/etc border.

So I got three initial ideas like the image below and I chose the first idea.

After deciding on the idea, I did research about racial, political, environmental and gender issues in order to decide the theme of the project, and chose gender issue. The reason why I chose the gender issue is that there are many serious gender problems in South Korea. In traditional Korean society, women's roles were confined to the home. From a young age, women were taught the virtues of subordination and endurance to prepare for their future roles as wife and mother. But there are still many people, especially men and older people, think women need to be polite and quiet and be looked like a woman, even though women's status in society and rights have progressed a lot. And these treatments continued in politics, company and daily life and it makes retrogression of women's status. I wanted to criticize this problem.

After that, I made the mood board relating to glasses and lens. 

[Change the idea / Research]

After getting the feedback from the presentation and tutorials, I narrowed down the theme more since the theme was still too vast, and gender discrimination exists everywhere like in education, work and even at home in South Korea. I was thinking about focusing on "a glass ceiling(And I thought I can relate "glasses/lens" to this topic) in South Korea because Korea ranked the lowest for 7 years. 

But while researching a glass ceiling in South Korea, I found that more than 50% of women experienced sexual harassment in the office and I read the news that one of the victims was dead because she was filmed by her coworkers in the office. So I researched more about digital sex crimes. I was interested more in "Digital Sex Crimes" so I decided to do it as my theme. Molka epidemic, hidden camera crime, has become 'part of daily life' in South Korea. I wanted to indicate a problem and hope people realize the seriousness of this crime.

I was going to use glasses/lens as a metaphor, but they became "real border" since the crime occurs through the camera lens.

I got the data on the website managing by the Government such as the National Police Agency, Korean Women's Development Institute website. 

https://www.police.go.kr/eng/main.do

https://eng.kwdi.re.kr/

[Who is my target? / Why did I change my target?]

My first target was just Korean men and older people. Because most victims of Molka crime are younger women and it means they might barely experience and do not need to be afraid of Molka every time they use a public toilet, changing rooms in clothing stores, gyms and swimming pools etc. And I was shocked one of the offenders does not feel guilty. Because, as he said, he just took pictures, never uploaded or put them on the Internet and just kept them personally ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWx0t2Nyw-w ). So I wanted to alert them to this problem. I thought the effective way to show the data/information impactful and direct was by showing the voices that real victims said in the survey. However, after I read the news, I thought it could be crucial remarks to victims since it makes them remind the scar that they experienced when they see the words in my project.

So I changed my main target audience(user) as foreigners who are interested in and wants to travel to or live in South Korea. For the reasons for the growth of K-pop and K-drama, more and more people are interested in travelling to Korea to experience the K-culture and popularity of South Korea as a tourist destination grows. For example, 9 in 10 K pop fans wants to visit Korea and the ratio of female k-pop fans is higher than male. It shows that many female global fans are willing to travel to South Korea and I believe most of them might not know about the seriousness of Molka because people usually do not research a crime rate when they plan. 

 

https://www.brandinginasia.com/celebrating-10-years-of-kpoptwitter-in-20-markets-worldwide/

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/culture/2019/10/141_277794.html

http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20200413000663