In South Korea, 540 car accidents occur in school zones every year. 81% of them are caused by illegally parked vehicles obstructing drivers’ sightlines. A child who steps out from behind a parked car is invisible to the driver approaching from the other direction until the gap between them has closed. The police were already issuing parking tickets. The tickets were not solving the problem. Dminusone and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism redesigned the ticket.
The Problem With the Original Parking Ticket
A standard parking ticket serves one purpose: it notifies the driver of an infringement and communicates a fine. It is placed under a windscreen wiper, read once, and either paid or contested. Its effect on the driver’s behaviour is financial rather than spatial. It tells the driver they parked wrongly. It does not tell any other driver on the road that a child may be about to appear from behind the vehicle carrying it.
The illegally parked vehicle in a school zone does not only endanger the driver who parked it. It endangers every child walking in its shadow and every driver approaching from the other direction who cannot see past it. The standard parking ticket addresses only the first party in that equation. The Safety Parking Ticket was designed to address all three.
The Design
The Safety Parking Ticket is a hanger-type document. Instead of lying flat under the windscreen wiper, it hangs from the wiper arm in a vertical format visible from a distance. The hanger displays the silhouette of a child at the bottom, positioned at the exact height a child would be when walking behind the illegally parked vehicle. The design is calibrated so that when the ticket hangs from the wiper, the child silhouette sits at the height a passing driver’s headlights would reach, making the implied presence of a child in that blind spot visible to any approaching vehicle.
The ticket functions simultaneously as an infringement notice for the driver who parked illegally and as a warning to every other driver on the road. The parking fine is carried on the same object that signals a child-height hazard to traffic. The two functions are inseparable from each other by design.
Why the Format Works
The standard parking ticket works because it creates a financial consequence for a behaviour that the driver has already completed. The Safety Parking Ticket works because it creates a visible safety signal during the period when the harmful consequences of that behaviour are still unfolding. The illegally parked vehicle does not endanger children only at the moment it parks. It does so for as long as it remains in place. The ticket that hangs from it for that entire period is communicating continuously rather than once.
The hanger format also ensures the ticket is visible from a greater distance and at a greater height than a flat windscreen document. A driver approaching a school zone sees the child silhouette hanging from the wiper before they are close enough to read the infringement details. The safety function precedes the punitive function, which is the correct ordering for a road safety intervention.
The Broader Pattern of the Agency and the Client
Dminusone and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism have produced a sustained body of work together in which government public safety communication is delivered through redesigned versions of objects that already exist in the relevant environment. The Growth Chart for Missing Children Board, also by Dminusone for the same client, placed missing children’s portraits on the height measurement boards already present in Korean convenience stores, so that the portraits appeared in the context where parents and children regularly stand together to measure growth. The Singing Soap embedded a handwashing awareness campaign into soap dispensers in public spaces.
Each of these campaigns shares the Safety Parking Ticket’s governing principle: find the object that already has a relationship with the behaviour you want to change or the audience you want to reach, and redesign that object rather than creating a new one. The parking ticket is already placed on every illegally parked car in every school zone. Making it also a safety signal required no new infrastructure, no new distribution system, and no additional budget beyond the redesign of the ticket format itself.
Campaign Name: The Safety Parking Ticket
Agency Name: Dminusone, Seoul, South Korea / Creative Directors: Donggil Kim, Janghan Kim / Art Director: Kookjeong Kwon / Account Executive: Hojin Hwang / Director: Eunu Choi / Production Company: Episode Film
Brand Name: Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, South Korea
Location: South Korea (ambient, design, OOH; January 2021)
