Electronic Rice Cooker design reflected in the Korean lifestyle and cultural changes: 70´s Electric Rice Cooker Design and its adversiting 

 

     Now a day, duty-free shopping has become one of the fundamental tasks that tourists must do during their Korean trip. Accessible prize, good quality and technological improvement seem to be some of the reasons why Korean products keep fascinating it´s visitors. Among them, the Korean rice cooker ´Cuckoo´, which selling reached 4 billion dollars in 2014, is on the list of the product tourists (specially Chinese) prefer the most. This rice cooker frenzy is similar to the Elephant Rice Cooker fever, a situation that took place 30 years ago when every Korean who had travelled to Japan returned with a Japanese rice cooker.

    However, the history of the popular Electric Rice Cooker seems to be longer. The term Jeon Gi Bab-Sot (Electric rice cooker which cooks and maintains the heat) refers the image Korean society visualizes of the typical electric good was generated in the early 80´s and the correlation term-image probably was a result from the design transformations and the ways how it had been promoted though it´s ads during 1960s and 70s. At this point, it is vital at the outset that until the 70s there were two different devices with two different functions: the Jeon Gi Bab Sot, which cooked the rice, and Jeon Gi Bab Tong which was served as a container to maintain the temperature of the cooked rice; this means that the two electrical goods existed independently.

    The purpose of the study is to examine the changes of the design and the way of promotion of the early Jeon-Gi Bab-Sot (electric rice cooker) and Jeon-Gi Bab-Tong (electric rice container) during 1970s in women´s magazines, and it´s reflection in the Korean lifestyle. South Korea, after the era of the export-first principle (1964-70) implement, went through a huge social political and economical changes such as the importation of new electric goods and national production, the building of the first apartment, and the propagation of different medias -women magazines have appeared-. From such context, the electric rice cooker and container, originally invented in Japan were imported to Korea and they proceed to be produced by national industries.