Design & the Future

November 15th 2016

After enough political activism yesterday, we're having a quieter day today and sleep in. Around noon we make our way to the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art — just to find out that we followed directions to a tiny branch of the museum: We end up in another palace with a park area showing a small special exhibition. The main attraction here is the beautiful park surrounding the palace — with the same picturesque autumn that we see all over Seoul.
Next up is the Dongdaemun Design Plaza — a large space designed by famous architects (Zaha Hadid, among others) housing various museums and stores.
The area looks very impressive — especially at night, thanks to moody lighting and hills full of glowing roses.
For dinner, we drive over to Sincheon (not to be confused with Incheon). Technically we wanted to go to Sinchon, but we only notice that that's on the other side of the city after spending 15 minutes of "well that street looks different on the map, though". There's food here, too, so all is well.
The e in Sincheon turned out to be our demise. Why on earth are there two stations with almost the same name?

By the way: It turns out eating out in Korea is more difficult than we first thought: In China, we could just point at something and be reasonably sure to be served something with noodles — but food is more complex here (cooler, too, though). We get large pans and gas burners brought to our table, meat grilled in front of us, and about one thousand small side dishes in tiny bowls spread out over the table. At times, I'm asking myself if I just filled tea water into a soup bowl and if the veggies next to that are somehow connected to it. So we're always happy when we get to sneakily learn what to do with the food from the locals one table across.
Imagine a waiter bringing us some stuff to eat and us having no idea what to do with the bowl in our hands — that's life here.

One day later

We get up early today — the early bird gets the free breakfast. We make our way across the Han River to be shown a utopian, if not slightly scary vision of the future in the Samsung d'light: At the entrance, we're given chipped paper bracelets, take pictures, and enter our names — to be addressed by name and in the right language at all of the interactive exhibits.
In here, electronics-giant Samsung shows what tricks smartphones & co can pull off and squeezes in quite some advertisement along the way. How can we stop climate change? Easy! Just use energy-efficient Samsung hard-drives, and the polar bears will feel much better already.
Despite company propaganda, the VR demos, interactive mirrors and smart home concepts are really cool and interesting — we do feel a little like in the future.

We got a little nauseous at the virtual reality demos, but we still had lots of fun.

After sunset we visit the river banks of Cheonggyecheon, where the yearly lantern festival of Seoul is taking place right now, with countless paper lanterns of all imaginable motifs floating on the small river.
Next to lanterns advertising brands, products or travel destinations, we also find a couple of art projects.