The Gap Between Room Advertising and Reality

The Gap Between Room Advertising and Reality

Kyung Jin Jeong

Royal College of Art MA. Information Experience Design Experimental Design Pathway 2020

Kyung Jin Jeong RCA2020

The Gap Between Room Advertising and Reality

Contents

1.

Introduction

3

2.

Small Rooms

4

3.

4.

5.

2.1.

Space for Dwelling

4

2.2.

Interviews with Individuals who Live in Small Rooms that were Falsely Advertised

6

Housing Issue: Small Rooms in Metropolises 3.1.

Goshiwons in South Korea

3.2.

Bedsits in the United Kingdom

The Attributes of Room Advertising Images

8 8 11

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4.1.

About Room Advertising

14

4.2.

How Room Reality is Distorted in Advertising (Applied to My Work)

15

Conclusion

19

Appendix

22

List of illustrations

22

Bibliography

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Kyung Jin Jeong RCA2020

1. Introduction Housing is becoming an increasingly important issue in big cities, and, since the worldwide outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, dwelling spaces have become especially important to people’s quality of life. On April 4th, 2020, The Economist published an article that stated ‘Half the world’s population has now been placed under stay-at-home orders, with the coronavirus pandemic having claimed over 58,000 lives.’1 This infectious disease has caused people to stay at home to prevent infection—according to Worldometer’s world population clock, this amounts to around 3.9 billion people.2 Thus, a person’s residence now plays multiple roles, serving as a workplace, resting place, and private place.

This leads to an important question: how do people find a house or room? With the expansion of the Internet and mobile devices, the number of people seeking rooms or houses online has increased. I intend to research how rooms in poor condition—or unpleasant living spaces—are deceptively distorted to look more attractive through advertising. These room advertisements do not reflect reality because advertisers use deceptive techniques to appeal to people’s desires. In modern societies, people are surrounded by fake or misleading images, with some advertising images intentionally distorted to create more compelling photos. My dissertation will explore this phenomenon.

‘The World in Brief, 4th April’, The Economist, 4 April 2020, https://espresso.economist.com/c1082e40d6bd5c5d64f2ccb8f73cea5c. Accessed [6 June 2020] 1

Worldometer, World Population Clock: 7.8 Billion People (2020), https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/. Accessed [6 June 2020] 2

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Figure 1. Screenshot of the SpareRoom website, for rentals in London.[6 June 2020] 3

Humans have a right to live in pleasant surroundings, as one’s home environment has a powerful effect on daily life. The demand for living in metropolises has also increased, and, consequently, landlords commonly seek architectural means to create smaller rooms in order to generate more profit.

My project focuses on studies of small-room advertising in metropolises. For the purposes of this project, small rooms are defined as spaces smaller than the minimum dwelling requirements in South Korea and the United Kingdom respectively. It is not uncommon for people living in big cities to reside in such small spaces; in a literature review that includes images, analyses, and interviews, this project will explore why room advertisement images diverge from reality. This dissertation responds to research on common strategies used to make commercial room images attractive, as well as research on the social issue of housing in big cities. The analysis and insights from this dissertation will elucidate how the images used for architectural advertisements are manipulated to differ from the real world.

2. Small Rooms 2.1. Space for Dwelling Humans need space to live, and having one’s own room can be a crucial part of life.

According to geographer Yi Fu Tuan, ‘Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other. There is no place like home. What is home? It is the old homestead, the old neighbourhood, home-town, or motherland.’4 Humans require a place to live for activities such as relaxing, sleeping and cooking, and the term ‘home’ not only refers to a residence, but also implies more personal meanings, such as ‘the motherland’, in people’s daily lives. Home gives people a sense of security.

Captured image of SpareRoom website for rentals in London., https://www.spareroom.co.uk/flatshare/?search_id=973413388& Accessed [6 June 2020] 3

Tuan, Yi-Fu, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota, 1977), p3.

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Tuan also notes that ‘human spaces reflect the quality of the human senses and mentality.’5 Thus, personal spaces are related to an individual’s health and thoughts, and a dwelling space is one of the most essential and necessary components of an individual’s experience of the built environment. We spend considerable time in our home spaces and are influenced by these rooms’ size and atmosphere.

Minimum housing requirements are not new and are becoming more common. According to the United Nations, ‘Today, 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 68% by 2050.’6 Many people prefer to reside in big cities, such as London, New York, Berlin and Seoul, simply because there are more job opportunities. Thus, the demand of dwellings in central locations in these cities has continued to increase.

Karel Teige (1900–1951), a Czech modernist artist and writer, stated in his monograph The Minimum Dwelling, that: The minimum dwelling has become the central problem of modern architecture and the battle cry of today’s architectural avant-garde. As a slogan, it is announced and promoted by contemporary architects because it sheds light on a situation that has reached a point requiring housing’s radical reform and modernization; as a battle cry, it calls for an answer to the question of the current housing crisis.7 The question of minimum dwelling sizes in central cities, such as Prague and London, was thus initially raised in 1932 and has not yet been solved, while the supply of affordable housing has not caught up with the demand for living space in urban areas.

Tuan, Yi-Fu, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota, 1977), p16.

5

United Nations, 68% of the world population projected to live in urban areas by 2050, says UN (2018), https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-revision-of-worldurbanization-prospects.html. Accessed [1 July 2020] 6

Teige, Karel, The Minimum Dwelling, translated by Eric Dluhosch (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002), p1.

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2.2. Interviews with Individuals who Live in Small Rooms that were Falsely Advertised To better understand individuals who had difficulty finding affordable housing in large cities, and to appreciate the experience of living in small rooms promoted by false advertising, I interviewed two young residents who live in minimum-sized spaces in London and Seoul.

For privacy, I will call them ‘Resident A’ (female, living in central London, under 30 years old) and ‘Resident B’ (male, living in Seoul, under 30 years old). In this section, I will analyse these interviews.

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Resident A: female, living in central London, 25-30 years old

Figure 2. (left) Resident A's desk and bed.

Figure 3. (right) Resident A's bedsit.

Resident A moved to London to study. She lives in a bedsit and shares a common area with other tenants. When she came to London, she had difficulty finding a room online, but her first rented room was finally found from an online advertisement on SpareRoom, a wellknown housing website and mobile application. She lives in a small room that is 2.1 by 2.4 metres—5.28 square metres. In the advertising, the room looked much larger. After she started to live in the room, she realised that the reality was quite different from the advertising photos. She described her room: ‘When you open the door, you immediately touch the chair and my desk, and on the left-hand side there is a single bed, which cannot be moved, because the room is so small.’ The advertising omitted to mention that there was insufficient space to put her belongings.

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After lockdown in London in March, Resident A had to stay in her small room. Since then, the room has been used at all times for all purposes, and as a result she is concerned about her mental health. Before COVID-19, her room was just for sleeping, and she used to spend her time outside. Working in her room is a significant challenge; when she creates artwork, she uses her bed as a storage space. However, she has little choice but to live here – yet, when she lies on the single mattress, she often imagines a larger space.

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Resident B: male, living in Seoul, 25-30 years old

Figure 4. (left). Resident B’s kitchen and laundry area.

Figure 5. (right). Resident B’s front door space.

Resident B lives alone in Seoul. He found the room through the mobile application Dabang, which advertises rooms for rent. The advertisement told him that the house was fully furnished and included a kitchen and laundry machines. After he rented the house, he noticed that the entryway of the house contained both a small kitchen and the laundry machines. The kitchen area is arguably too small to use, so Resident B uses it more as a storage space for daily necessities. The bathroom also has all the essential functions of a bathroom crammed into an area of less than one square metre.

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The kitchen and laundry area were shown in the advertising, but, in real life, their essential functionality is unavailable. He gave up using the kitchen and goes out to eat, and there is the ventilation is so poor that, when he uses the washing machine, the laundry smells unpleasant; as a result, he now does laundry at a laundromat nearby. The advertisement hid the room’s flaws, such as the lack of soundproofed walls and the cramped spaces. The luxury that the images in the advertisement offered did not exist in the way that was promised.

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Summary

According to the interviewees, the advertisements they saw made the rooms look more comfortable and spacious than they actually are. For young people, it is not easy to find suitable accommodation in a big city. While the younger generation looks for rooms on the Internet8, advertising images continue to lure them in with the promise of a good room on a low budget. However, once in residence, they discover the difference between advertising and reality.

3. Housing Issue: Small Rooms in Metropolises 3.1. Goshiwons in South Korea

They visited the rooms before signing a contract; however, they told me that they didn’t have enough time to sufficiently appraise them.

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Figure 6. (left). Cities with the highest cost of living worldwide in 2019.

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Figure 7. (right). Cities with the most expensive rental rates worldwide in 2016 and 2017. 10

Figures 6 and 7 show the cities with the highest costs of living and rental costs worldwide.

Seoul was the 13th most expensive city in 2019 and had the 11th highest rent in 2017. Many young people travel from other regions of South Korea to Seoul and need a room, but they are not easy to find because of limited housing and high prices. In 2018, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport set a minimum living space of 18 square metres for a single-person household, but, even with such minimum standards, smaller cheap residence units, called goshiwons, are available due to the high cost of other accommodation in Seoul.

Figure 8. (left). Inside a goshiwon.

Cities with the highest cost of living worldwide in 2019., EuroCost, The most expensive cities worldwide- 2019 Expat cost of living ranking, (1 October 2019), https://www.eurocost.com/en/news/162-2019-expat-cost-of-living-ranking [Accessed 4 July 2020] 10 Inside a goshiwon., Gi Yong Park, Chang Hun Cho (14 Sep 2017), http://heri.kr/heri/945832 Accessed [4 July 2020] 9

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Figure 9. (right). A 3.5-square-metre goshiwon room in Sinchon, a university neighbourhood in Seoul, furnished with a desk, bookshelf and bed.

In the Korean Herald article ‘Gosiwon11, Modern Time Refuge for House Poor’, journalist DaSol Kim stated, Gosiwon are a form of low-cost, cocoon-like accommodation, usually larger rooms divided by thin walls and makeshift doors. Rooms are rented on a monthly basis and are the cheapest and most flexible form of housing in a country where better options almost always require handsome deposits. Rooms are as tiny as 3.5 square meters and furnished with a desk, bookshelf and bed.12 A 3.5-square-metre goshiwon is around a fifth the size of the minimum dwelling space standard of 18 square metres, and these types of accommodation are susceptible to fires because builders remodel standard houses to create more rooms using cheap, lightweight construction materials.

Figure 10. (left) The outside of a goshiwon. (right) The goshiwon’s second floor plan, which is divided into ten equal rooms. 13

In Korea, ‘Goshiwon’ and ‘Gosiwon’ are acceptable transliterations. ‘Goshiwon’ is more proper than ‘Gosiwon’. In the dissertation, I used ‘Goshiwon’. However, the article’s author has used “Gosiwon”. https://en.dict.naver.com/#/userEntry/koen/c263af9d53e608317e36e39745c1f188 11

Da-sol, Kim. ‘Gosiwon, Modern Time Refuge For House Poor’, Korean Herald, 24 September 2017, http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20170924000045. Accessed [1 June 2020] 13 The outside of a goshiwon. (right) The goshiwon’s second floor plan, which is divided into ten equal rooms, ‘The birth and evolution of Goshiwon’, 3siot, 12

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Kyung Jin Jeong RCA2020

As shown in Figure 10, the goshiwon building is divided into many rooms to maximise profits for landlords. To minimise wasted space, goshiwon rooms lining up on both sides of a hall have become common. In an advertisement promoting goshiwons, the units are portrayed as pleasant-looking spaces—despite the poor conditions—by the use of a mobile image filter application, a wide camera lens, and digital image manipulation.

3.2. Bedsits in the United Kingdom In 2017, an article entitled ‘London is Europe’s most expensive city for high-end rental accommodation’, written by James Davis, noted that ‘Rents for an unfurnished threebedroom apartment across popular expatriate areas in London average US$7,886 (£5,574) per month.14 In US dollar terms, rents in the city are significantly higher, approximately 40%, than in Europe's next-most expensive location, Zurich’. London is thus known for having the highest rents in Europe.

http://www.3siot.org/%EA%B3%A0%EC%8B%9C%EC%9B%90%EC%9D%98-%ED%83%84%EC% 83%9D%EA%B3%BC-%EC%A7%84%ED%99%94/ Accessed [1 June 2020] Davis, James, ‘London is Europe’s most expensive city for high-end rental accommodation’,Mynewsdesk, 24 Jan 2017, http://www.mynewsdesk.com/uk/ecainternational/pressreleases/london-is-europes-most-expensive-city-for-high-end-rentalaccommodation-1763965 Accessed [1 June 2020] 14

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Kyung Jin Jeong RCA2020

Figure 11. Europe's highest rental costs.15

London’s housing problem, which makes it hard for those with a low budget to find a room, has steadily increased. The UK government has acknowledged the housing crisis in London, with the London Assembly report Living in Limbo: London’s temporary accommodation crisis explaining that ‘the number of London households in temporary accommodation has risen by 50 percent in the past five years, reaching 56,560 households in the final quarter of 2018’. 16 In London, bedsit rooms (defined as ‘an apartment with only one room that is used for both sleeping and living in’) are a common type of residence.17 A bedsit is thus similar in purpose

Europe's highest rental costs. ‘London is Europe’s most expensive city for high-end rental accommodation’, My New Desk, (24 Jan 2017), http://www.mynewsdesk.com/uk/ecainternational/pressreleases/london-is-europes-most-expensive-city-for-high-end-rentalaccommodation-1763965 Accessed [6 June 2020] 15

London Assemby Housing Committee, Living in Limbo: London’s temporary accommodation crisis (May 2019) https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/temporary_accommodation_report__living_in_limbo_-_final.pdf (p2) Accessed [6 June 2020] 16

Merriam Webster Dictionary, https://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/bedsit#:~:text=English%20Language%20Learners%20Definition%20of,the%2 0English%20Language%20Learners%20Dictionary Accessed [2 July 2020] 17

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and usage to a goshiwon. To create bedsits, several rooms of a house are given to different tenants, and, in London, some landlords even rent the living room as a separate bedsit. An article in The Guardian exposed the negative aspects of poor housing situations: ‘According to an analysis of house-sharing websites advertising rooms for rent, 90% advertised in London had no separate living room, with communal space turned into a bedroom’. Similar research undertaken by The Times found that one living room had been divided into two small bedrooms, with a partition wall going across a radiator and a window’.18 Building owners are eliminating even the smallest amount of space to maximise profit. There is less space, and more people living in it. For example, a headline for an article in the Daily Mail read ‘A bed under the stairs for £500-a-month: Woman is shocked by this tiny London flat share’. 19 Alex Lomax, who was looking for a room in 2015, claimed that the advertised room (for which she would pay £560 per month) was in reality a cupboard under a staircase.

Emine Saner, Nine out of 10 shared houses don’t have a living room. Here’s why we need them, The Guardian, (30 Sep 2019) https://www.theguardian.com/money/shortcuts/2019/sep/30/sharedhouses-dont-have-living-room-landlords-communal-space-into-bedrooms-tenants-socialise Accessed [7 June 2020] 18

Mullin, Gemma, ‘A bed under the stairs for £500-a-month: Woman is shocked by this tiny London flat share (although the advert did say it wasn't for 'someone who will just stay in their room)’, Daily Mail, (30 September 2015), https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3254727/A-bed-stairs-500month-Woman-shocked-tiny-London-flat-share-advert-DOES-say-s-not-just-stay-room.html Accessed [30 May 2020] 19

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Figure 12. The cupboard being rented for £560 per month, by Alex Lomax 20

The article further states that: Alex Lomax, 23, attended the flat viewing in Clapham, south west London, today but couldn’t believe it when she was faced with no more than a single mattress on the floor of a cloakroom. It had been advertised as a single furnished room in a house share, which comes with a ‘bed’, for £500 a month - although that doesn’t include the £60 per month on bills.21 London's monthly rent has soared, and the ever-increasing demand has reached the point that even spandrels are considered viable residential spaces. Even if the condition of a room is poor, it is often advertised as a desirable room

4. The Attributes of Room Advertising Images 4.1. About Room Advertising

Advertising’s fundamental aim is to convince a potential consumer to buy a product or service. To succeed in advertising rooms to future tenants, adverts must contain positive messages and images.

Images in advertising are intentionally designed by their creators. A Czech-born philosopher and writer, Vilem Flusser (1920–1991), described the word ‘design’ as follows: ‘In English, the word design is both a noun and a verb (which tells one a lot about the nature of the English language). As a noun, it means – among other things –

The cupboard being rented for £560 per month, by Alex Lomax, ‘A bed under the stairs for £500-amonth: Woman is shocked by this tiny London flat share (although the advert did say it wasn't for 'someone who will just stay in their room')’ , Alex Lomax, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article3254727/A-bed-stairs-500-month-Woman-shocked-tiny-London-flat-share-advert-DOES-say-s-notjust-stay-room.html 20

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Mullin, Gemma, ‘A bed under the stairs for £500-a-month’ [Accessed 30 May 2020]

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“intention”, “plan”, “intent”, “aim”, “scheme”, “plot”, “motif”, “basic structure”, all these (and other meanings) being connected with cunning and deception. 22 According to Vilem, design means intention—the aim to deliver a plan. Advertising images are by design, and advertisements are deliberately designed to stimulate potential consumers’ desires.

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard perceived a world of images in which originals and duplicates are made, and he showed deep insight into how images distort and replicate reality. Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation states that ‘Today, what we are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of advertising.’23 In modern society, advertising is prevalent in daily life; people know what advertising is, but they are not often conscious of how many advertisements they encounter. As Baudrillard claims, the boundary between reality and images has become blurred.

In contemporary culture, people who want to live in a metropolis on a small budget commonly choose a room based on advertising on a mobile application or website - but the reality of the property is often different from how it appears in the advertisement. In other words, there is a clear gap between advertising and lived reality. People are surrounded by images that are deceptive or designed to stimulate their desires, and most room advertisement images are intentionally manipulated to provoke interest; in so doing, they also distort spaces and interiors.

4.2. How Room Reality is Distorted in Advertising (Applied to My Work) The monograph ‘Social Communication in Advertising’ discusses house advertisements and claims that:

Flusser, Vilem, The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design, translated by Anthony Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), p17.

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Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Shelia Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), p87.

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‘Older advertisements are a treasure house of fascinating and often amusing illustrations of how people and products used to look; exhuming and examining them turns out to be a pleasant chore.’24 This quotation illustrates that, even before photography, people were already distorting the images in housing adverts.

To research the difference between real space and advertising, I collected and categorised commercial room advertising images and images of rooms in use, in order to determine the strategy behind their production and to analyse their common attributes. The most common methods of producing the advertising images include using different camera angles, reducing the number of items in the room, and image distortion.

Figure 13. (left) The image of the advertising version.

Figure 14. (right) The image of the ‘real’ version.

Figures 13 and 14—pictures that I took—show these three common strategies in advertising. The first is to adjust the angle; generally, in commercial room images, the photographer uses a broader lens (such as a fish-eye lens) to make the room appear more spacious, and the lens type can change the results. The room will also look wider and longer if the photographer tilts the camera slightly and takes the picture at an angle looking up.

The second method is to reduce the number of items in the room. To suggest a room is more spacious than in reality, limited furniture and personal items are depicted in the

Leiss, William, Stephen Kiline and Sut Jhally, Social Communication in Advertising: Persons, Products & Images of Well-being (London: Routledge, 1990), p138.

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advertisement. Including only a minimum number of items has the effect of expanding the space.

The third method is image distortion, such as stretching and lightening photos. If you look at advertising images closely, you can find some odd inconsistencies, such as a wall appearing tilted to make the space appear wider or furniture appearing wider than normal. Regarding the brightness, the overall tone of advertising is lighter than a realistic image owing to adjustments provided by artificial lights.

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Machine Learning, CycleGAN

Generally, a photograph is assumed to represent reality – but photographic image distortion can be created using Photoshop, and through the use of various camera angles or perspectives. There is a need, then, to identify the real from the fake, and artificial intelligence might be able to distinguish between advertising images and reality. In my research, I experimented with this idea using machine learning and a generative adversarial network (GAN), which is a class of machine learning frameworks.25 According to Jason Brownlee, a machine learning specialist, a CycleGAN is ‘a technique that involves the automatic training of image-to-image translation models without paired examples.’26 By exploiting a well-known classification neural network, a GAN can be taught the distribution of a given dataset. CycleGAN can transform images by learning both types of images—those of reality and those modified for advertising.

To work with a GAN, I selected 800 different room images—both 400 room advertising images and 400 unmodified room images. The algorithm of the GAN then determined the differences between the photos. With these results learned, we are creating interactive programs in which trained AI converts photos when people upload their own photos or commercial photos from the Internet; this work27 converts real-life room photos into commercial images and vice versa. When people put a realistic room image into our web program, it returns a

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I collaborated with Chan Hee Cho, a computer scientist.

Jason Brownlee, A Gentle Introduction to CycleGAN for Image Translation, Machine Learning Mastery (17 August 2019) https://machinelearningmastery.com/what-iscyclegan/#:~:text=The%20CycleGAN%20is%20a%20technique,translation%20models%20without%2 0paired%20examples.&text=CycleGAN%20is%20a%20technique%20for,images%20from%20two%2 0different%20domains. Accessed [30 May 2020] 27 Chan Hee Cho and KyungJin Jeong, www.chanheecho.com/machine_learning/small_room 26

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transformed image. This transformation draws attention to the distortions common within the advertisement industry. This piece shows the audience the distortion and transformation in advertising using the artificial network trained from the initial 800 images provided to it.

Figure 15. (left) The original advertising photograph Figure 16. (right) From advertising image to ‘fake reality’: the fake photograph after processing through CycleGAN.

Figure 15 shows the original advertising image, whereas Figure 16 is the altered version used to convey an impression of reality (but is, in actuality, fake and created by AI). Using data learning, the AI created a fake realistic image (Figure 16) and identified the original as the brighter image. The overall tone of fake ‘reality’ photo was darker, and the furniture looks used.

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Figure 17. (left) Original photo Figure 18. (right) From reality to advertising: fake advertising created by CycleGAN.

Regarding Figure 17 and 18, the image is changed from a normal photograph to a fake, advertising-style image. Figure 18 shows how real-life room photos can be transformed into commercial images by machine learning. The AI can identify when an image’s brightness has been adjusted to give the room more light, and learn to associate this lightness with the image used in advertising the room. This transformation is a common distortion used in the advertising industry.

This project demonstrated the distortion and transformation in commercials using an artificial network that has learned from a substantial number of unpaired images. The remarkable conclusion is that the differences between images from lived reality and those used in advertising are notable enough that an algorithm can be trained to exploit them.

5. Conclusion In 2020, an article titled ‘Should you buy or rent a house based on a virtual viewings?’, it mentioned that ’Estate agents are increasingly offering video tours and virtual viewings to buyers and renters as they look to tempt them into making offers during the coronavirus lockdown.’28 Lately, virtual tours for property viewings have risen because of the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic,. If someone is looking for a residence now, they will often make their decision based on screen-based images or films produced by real estate agents. These potential residents are deprived of an opportunity to check the room, arguably because it might cause them to be disappointed in their accommodation. The current situation, in which people should sign contracts without directly checking at the house, puts people under pressured to decide, which could induce them to accept substandard residences. Depending on the advertising provided, this could make people more conscious of the gap between real space and the intentional framing of that space. Most people believe that they can distinguish between advertising images and images of reality. However, a blind spot often exists when it comes to room advertisements—people unconsciously accept the advertising image and end up disappointed. To view the hidden flaws and poor intentions in commercial Stephen Maunder, ‘Should you buy or rent a house based on a virtual viewing?’, Which (1 May 2020), https://www.which.co.uk/news/2020/05/should-you-buy-or-rent-a-house-based-on-a-virtualviewing/ Accessed [4 July 2020] 28

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room advertising, people should detect and encode these hidden structures into their thought processes.29 In Baudrillard’s monograph The Consumer Society, he suggests that: ‘The content of the messages, the signifieds of the signs are largely immaterial. We are not engaged in them, and the media do not involve us in the world, but offer for our consumption signs as signs, albeit signs accredited with the guarantee of the real.’ 30 As Baudrillard points out, a commercial image’s central message is positive regardless; in reality, the fake image is not part of the promise of the positive message in the advertisement.

Baudrillard also remarked that: ‘We may, admittedly, say that it is, then, our fantasies which come to be signified in the image and consumed in it. But this psychological aspect interests us less than what comes into the image to be both consumed in it and repressed: the real world, the event, history.’31 An image has its own language, and, depending on the creator’s intention, it can either tell the truth or lie.

This leads to a vital question: why do people use distorted images in advertising? In part, these images are taking advantage of people’s natural desire to live better lives. It is also relatively easy; distorting an image is not difficult using modern technology, and it is often hard to suppress an advertiser’s appetite to transform a realistic image into a persuasive one.

In metropolises like London and Seoul, there are many social housing issues, and the demand for housing has increased greatly over time. Unfortunately, the supply has not kept up with the demand. As such, some landlords have asked architects to create small rooms

The importance of this ability is discussed by Vilem Flusser in Towards a Philosophy of Photography, who claims that “this lack of criticism of technical images is potentially dangerous at a time when technical images are in the process of displacing texts - dangerous for the reason that the ‘objectivity’ of technical images is an illusion” (p15).

30 Baudrillard Jean, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, translated by Chris Turner (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan, 1998), p.34.

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Baudrillard Jean, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, translated by Chris Turner (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan, 1998), p.33.

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in order to increase their profits, and some advertisers design attractive room images to draw people’s attention. In other words, they intentionally design room images or videos to look appealing—the cost of space in big cities has led to the construction of overly small living areas, and advertisers are misleading potential residents.

Susan Sontag writes of the ‘mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs’, and argues that ‘the reality has come to seem more and more what we are shown by camera’. As a result, ‘the omnipresence of photographs has an incalculable effect on our ethical sensibility. By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.’32 As Sontag explains, people unconsciously believe that photos are more accurate than the human eye. As in the saying ‘seeing is believing,’ we tend to rely on photographic images as reliable sources. Society has thus become accustomed to advertisements that promise a better life than is available in reality. In this technologically advanced world, anyone can take a picture and download mobile filter applications to distort it as they wish. We should, however, avoid allowing tenants to be deceived by rooms that are below the minimum living requirements and that are advertised as better than they are. We should, in other words, make efforts to reduce the gap between advertising and reality.

Quoted in Pallasmaa Juhani, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons Limited, 2012), p.33.

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Appendix

Interview Questions

1. Where do you live? (city, country) 2. What is the approximate size of the room? (metre by metre) 3. Do you consider this to be a small room?

4. How did you find the room? (e.g., advertised online) 5. Do you feel that the advertisement was different to how the room was in reality?

6. How do you feel about living in this space?

7. How would you describe the room?

8. Could you describe the effects of living in this room on your way of life?

9. How is the current COVID-19 situation affecting your experience in your living space?

10. Assuming the answer to 3 is ‘yes’, what do you think about the small room?

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Kyung Jin Jeong RCA2020

Figure 1. Captured image of SpareRoom website for rentals in London., https://www.spareroom.co.uk/flatshare/?search_id=973413388& Accessed [6 June 2020] Figure 6 (Right) Resident A’s desk and bed, Resident A, 2020

Figure 7 (left) Resident A's bedsit., Resident A, 2020 Figure 4. Resident B’s kitchen and laundry area. ,Resident B, 2019 Figure 5. Resident B’s front door space. ,Resident B, 2019

Figure 6. Cities with the highest cost of living worldwide in 2019., EuroCost, The most expensive cities worldwide- 2019 Expat cost of living ranking, (1 October 2019), https://www.eurocost.com/en/news/162-2019-expat-cost-of-living-ranking

Figure 7. Cities with the most expensive rental rates worldwide in 2016 and 2017. ,Europe's highest rental costs. ‘London is Europe’s most expensive city for high-end rental accommodation’, My New Desk, (24 Jan 2017), http://www.mynewsdesk.com/uk/eca-international/pressreleases/london-iseuropes-most-expensive-city-for-high-end-rental-accommodation-1763965

Figure 8. Inside a goshiwon., Gi Yong Park, Chang Hun Cho (14 Sep 2017), http://heri.kr/heri/945832

Figure 9. A 3.5-square-metre goshiwon room in Sinchon, a university neighbourhood in Seoul, furnished with a desk, bookshelf and bed. , Da-sol Kim. ‘Gosiwon, Modern Time Refuge For House Poor’, Korean Herald, (24 September 2017), http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20170924000045.

Figure 10. The outside of a goshiwon. (right) The goshiwon’s second floor plan, which is divided into ten equal rooms., http://www.3siot.org/%EA%B3%A0%EC%8B%9C%EC%9B%90%EC%9D%98-%ED%83%84%EC% 83%9D%EA%B3%BC-%EC%A7%84%ED%99%94/ Figure 11. Europe's highest rental costs. ‘London is Europe’s most expensive city for high-end rental accommodation’, My New Desk, (24 Jan 2017), http://www.mynewsdesk.com/uk/ecainternational/pressreleases/london-is-europes-most-expensive-city-for-high-end-rentalaccommodation-1763965 Figure 12. The cupboard being rented for £560 per month, by Alex Lomax, ‘A bed under the stairs for £500-a-month: Woman is shocked by this tiny London flat share (although the advert did say it wasn't

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Kyung Jin Jeong RCA2020

for 'someone who will just stay in their room')’ , Alex Lomax, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article3254727/A-bed-stairs-500-month-Woman-shocked-tiny-London-flat-share-advert-DOES-say-s-notjust-stay-room.html

Figure 13. The image of the advertising version. Kyung Jin Jeong, 2020

Figure 14. The image of the realistic version., Kyung Jin Jeong, 2020

Figure 15. (left) The original advertising photo

Figure 16. (right) From advertising image to fake reality: the fake reality photo after processing through CycleGAN. Chan Hee Cho and Kyung Jin Jeong, 2020

Figure 17. (left) Original photo

Figure 18. (right) From reailty to advertising: fake advertising created by CycleGAN. Chan Hee Cho and Kyung Jin Jeong, 2020

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Kyung Jin Jeong RCA2020

Bibliography

Online Brownlee, Jason, ‘A Gentle Introduction to CycleGAN for Image Translation’, Machine Learning Mastery, 17 August 2019, https://machinelearningmastery.com/what-iscyclegan/#:~:text=The%20CycleGAN%20is%20a%20technique,translation%20models%20without%2 0paired%20examples.&text=CycleGAN%20is%20a%20technique%20for,images%20from%20two%2 0different%20domains.

Davis, James, ‘London is Europe’s most expensive city for high-end rental accommodation’, Mynewsdesk, 24 Jan 2017, http://www.mynewsdesk.com/uk/eca-international/pressreleases/londonis-europes-most-expensive-city-for-high-end-rental-accommodation-1763965 Emine, ‘Nine out of 10 shared houses don’t have a living room. Here’s why we need them’, The Guardian, 30 Sep 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/money/shortcuts/2019/sep/30/shared-housesdont-have-living-room-landlords-communal-space-into-bedrooms-tenants-socialise Mullin, Gemma, ‘A bed under the stairs for £500-a-month: Woman is shocked by this tiny London flat share (although the advert did say it wasn’t for ‘someone who will just stay in their room’)’, Daily Mail, 30 September 2015, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3254727/A-bed-stairs-500-monthWoman-shocked-tiny-London-flat-share-advert-DOES-say-s-not-just-stay-room.html London Assembly Housing Committee, ‘Living in Limbo: London’s temporary accommodation crisis’, (May 2019) https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/temporary_accommodation_report__living_in_limbo_-_final.pdf Merriam Webster Dictionary, https://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/bedsit#:~:text=English%20Language%20Learners%20Definition%20of,the%2 0English%20Language%20Learners%20Dictionary Maunder, Stephen, ‘Should you buy or rent a house based on a virtual viewing?’, Which (1 May 2020), https://www.which.co.uk/news/2020/05/should-you-buy-or-rent-a-house-based-on-a-virtualviewing/ ‘The World in Brief’, 4th April’, The Economist, 4 April 2020, https://espresso.economist.com/c1082e40d6bd5c5d64f2ccb8f73cea5c.

United Nations, ‘68% of the world population projected to live in urban areas by 2050, says UN (2018), https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-revision-of-worldurbanization-prospects.html.

Worldometer, World Population Clock: 7.8 Billion People (2020), https://www.worldometers.info/worldpopulation/.

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Books

Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Shelia Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994) Baudrillard, Jean, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, translated by Chris Turner (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan, 1998) Flusser, Vilem, The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design, translated by Anthony Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 1999) Flusser, Vilem, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, translated by Anthony Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000) Guillery, Peter, The small house in eighteenth-century London: the vernacular metropolis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) Leiss, William, Stephen Kiline and Jhally Sut, Social Communication in Advertising: Persons, Products & Images of Well-being (London: Routledge, 1990) Myers, Greg, Ad Worlds (London: Arnold, 1999) Packard, Vance, The Hidden Persuaders (London: Penguin Books, 1957) Pallasmaa, Juhani, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons Limited, 2012) Rose, Gillian, Visual Methodologies (London: SAGE, 2016) Teige, Karel, The Minimum Dwelling, translated by Eric Dluhosch (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002) Tuan Yi-Fu, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota, 1977)

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