by Dan Harvey and Amanda Wills
In early December Q20’s beloved freelancers, Dan Harvey and Amanda Wills, took an educational journey to the East, to Seoul, South Korea to assist in teaching a Design Thinking Seminar at Fab Lab Seoul.
(Photo Credit Oscar Alejandro Rios)
While in Seoul one of the first things that struck us was the huge difference in the approach to retail design and display than what we were accustomed to back home. More specifically, the product display, the overall retail “neighborhoods” within Seoul, and the abundant usage of dynamic signage radically differed from our previous conceptions of retail space design.
Compared to the Western Retail experience, where stores contain a range of products and experiences, we were drawn to the “market style” experience ranging throughout the city. Most of the traditional markets are situated along the man made river (Cheonggyecheon), into areas specializing from Chungmuro Pet Market, to the Dongdaemun Fabric Market, to the Euljiro Hardware Market.
Photos by Amanda Wills
Within these specialized markets, each vendor specializes in a single product, from door handles, to plumbing pipe, to socks… The approach to the product display seems to be cramming as much product and variations of the same product, in order to draw in the consumer. The experience is almost claustrophobic, product stuck in every nook and surface that one has to wiggle around the shop and hope not to break that expensive golden buddha sitting precariously on an overstuffed, bowing shelf.
Photos by Amanda Wills
Photo by Dan Harvey
The signage of these shopping neighborhoods also followed the same idea. Lit up signs in Korean characters hung off the sides of buildings often obscuring an entire facade. Walking through these areas at night provided for a surreal view of blinking colors and screens.
Once you can finally decide on a purchase within this overwhelming experience, we were also intrigued by the elaborate packaging design, hitting home the unique shopping experience of these two foreigners tromping around Seoul. Products, mostly food related, from a pack of strawberries, to candy, to a faceted box of cereal all had extremely loud and vibrant packaging usually containing cartoon animals and small anime characters. The packaging seemed a very material intensive, yet futuristic, step up from western methods.
(Right) Photo by Amanda Wills
All these huge differences in the Korean Marketplaces created for a very interesting shopping experience and allowed us to find new extremes in retail design to adapt and use back home.