Investigation on the Awareness and Preference for Wood to Promote the Value of Wood: II. Awareness of Wood Cultural Resources

Individuals were presented with the description of wood culture (i.e., the totality of all spiritual and material products that humans, the members of a society, have learned through wood and have been handed down) and cultural resources (i.e., objects that need to be preserved or can be used because they contain cultural values and meanings) and were asked whether they have an associative image that comes up on hearing the word “wood cultural resources”; 31.4% of the respondents responded “yes” to this question. As for the reason why they had no associative image of “wood cultural resources,” 40.2% said it was because the concept of wood cultural resources was ambiguous, 40.1% said it was because they had never thought about wood cultural resources, and 19.7% of the respondents said it was because there is no symbolic representation of wood cultural resources. Among the respondents, more males found the concept of wood cultural resources to be ambiguous, and more females responded that they had never thought about wood cultural resources.

The images that came to mind on hearing the term “wood cultural resources” were as follows (in descending order): “Hanok/traditional house” (18.3%), “palace” (15.8%), “temple” (14.2%), “cultural assets” (9.2%), “wooden building” (4.8%), “eco-friendly” (4.2%), “environmentally friendly” (3.3%), and “tree” (3.2%) (Fig. 1). Compared to the results of collecting associative images about wood or wood culture, which mainly presented images such as materials, cultural heritage, and environment-friendliness (Han and Lee, 2021), most images associated with wood cultural resources were related to cultural properties and wooden buildings. This suggests that the definition of wood culture and cultural resources has reached the general public as a tradition and resources inherited from the past. Wood cultural resources can be classified into seven detailed items: cultural heritage, cultural facilities, cultural festivals, architecture of wood, cultural contents, cultural education, and wood products. Among them, resources inherited from the past are expressed as cultural heritage (Han et al., 2021). At present, it can be judged that cultural heritage is the first image that comes to the general public’s mind when hearing the term “wood cultural resources.”

Fig. 1. Word cloud for images related wood cultural resources.

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Among the seven elements of wood cultural resources, “cultural heritage,” represented by palaces, temples, gayageum, and yutnori, was regarded the most important (40.1%), followed by “architecture of wood” (20.5%) and “cultural facilities” (19.5%), “cultural festivals” (8.5%), “wood products” (5.9%), “wood education” (3.7%), and “cultural contents” (1.8%). Even when three choices were selected, the order of importance for each type was the same (Table 2). Based on the response ranked no.1, the lower the age group, the higher the response rate that “cultural facilities” is important, and the higher the age group, the higher the response rate that “cultural heritage” is important. The importance of each type of wood cultural resource selected by the general public was consistent with the result of the associative image, where images related to cultural heritage and wooden buildings such as palaces, temples, Hanoks, and cultural assets were the most frequent.

As for the level of interest in wood cultural resources (Table 3), positive responses such as “very interested” (5.5%) and “interested” (33.5%) constituted 39.0%, and negative responses such as “not interested at all” (4.0%) and “not interested” (13.7%) constituted 17.7%. As for the reason for not being interested in wood cultural resources, lack of interest was the highest at 37.0%, followed by no thoughts about it at all (33.6%), lack of information (21.3%), and lack of time and money (7.7%).

Table 4 presents the survey results on the sufficiency and necessity of the information presented as reasons why people have no interest in wood cultural resources. Regarding whether they have enough information, “quite enough” and “sufficient” responses were 0.6% and 3.4%, respectively, indicating that only 4.0% of the respondents said it was sufficient, and the response rates for “very scarce” and “insufficient” was very high at 64.8%. With regard to whether information on wood cultural resources is necessary, 6.1% and 40.6% of the responses were “very necessary” and “necessary,” respectively, indicating that 46.7% answered that it was necessary. Responses stating that it is “very unnecessary” and “not necessary” were 1.6% and 8.4, respectively, constituting 10.0% of the responses. The need for information on wood cultural resources was 46.7%, which did not reach the majority of the survey subjects, while 64.8% (more than half of the survey subjects) answered that insufficient information was provided. More than 39.0% of the respondents who indicated they were interested in wood cultural resources responded that they needed information about wood cultural resources. To increase the level of interest in wood cultural resources, it is necessary to seek more diverse methods of information provision. Further, securing varied content should be given priority to provide information and publicize wood cultural resources to the general public. The research on content production in fields such as education, advertising, tourism, and culture and the storytelling techniques used in these fields are suitable for providing information on wood cultural resources to the general public. Storytelling is a compound word (made up of “story” and “telling”), which conveys the media characteristics of the story, the method of expression, and technical aspects and actively reflects the characteristics of the interactive media environment (Park, 2006). The components of storytelling can be set as relevance, truthfulness, clarity, and interest (Kwak and Song, 2016). These characteristics make it an effective knowledge transfer method that enables easy understanding of complex and difficult concepts. This method can address the causes for lack of interest such as “no thoughts about it at all” and “lack of information.” A scientific approach to trees, the raw materials for wood and wood products, can be a way to create a story about wood and to add cultural value to it. Studies on the traditional processing methods applied to wood (Park et al., 2020; Lee et al., 2021) and on the processing of large-cross-section timbers traditionally used in wooden facilities (Han et al., 2019a; Han et al., 2019b; Lee, 2020) can scientifically explain the traditional processing methods of wood to the general public. Research on various methods for measuring the annual rings of wood (Oh et al., 2019a; Oh et al., 2019b) is a way in which a story can be placed into wood from the dendrochronolgy analysis that predicts the past growth environment of trees and raw materials of wood. Further, tree species identification, morphological analysis, and wood characteristic analysis (Lee and Bae, 2021; Lee et al., 2021; Nam and Kim., 2021) of wooden relics excavated from historical sites enable interpretations of the climate of the production period of the relics and the wood processing method, which offer various topics of interest about wood to the general public.

Following the investigation of the wood cultural resources that individuals intend to experience or use within the next year, it was shown that “wood products” was the highest at 78.6%, followed by “cultural heritage” (74.8%), “cultural festivals” (72.2%), “cultural facilities” (69.6%), and “architecture of wood” (64.8%). The intention to use “cultural contents” and “cultural education” was relatively low at 47.8% and 42.9%, respectively. Among the respondents, males showed a higher intention to use “cultural contents” and “cultural education” than females; respondents below 29 years of age showed the lowest intention to use wood cultural resources, whereas respondents aged above 60 years had the highest intention rates.

For the category of wood products, which was rated to have relatively low importance with a response rate of 5.9% in the survey on the importance of wood cultural resources, participants showed a high intention to use. This could be because although the public has a low interest in wood cultural resources, wood was recognized a material based on the image association of wood and wood culture (Han and Lee, 2021), which may lead to the high intention to use wood products such as furniture and household items that can be easily encountered in daily life.

With regard to the question of what was or can be obtained through wood cultural resources, the most common opinion was increasing the awareness of the necessity of using wood (25.2%), followed by having an interesting and enjoyable time (24.6%), obtaining knowledge or information related to wood (20.8%), increasing interest in wood culture (18.0%), and generating a positive perception of wood (10.9%). Thus, it can be seen that the lower the age, the more the number of participants with the opinion of “having an interesting and enjoyable time” and the higher the age, the higher the opinion of “increasing awareness of the necessity of using wood” among participants. Experience can be divided into four factors, namely entertainment, education, getaway, and aesthetic sense according to the degree of individual participation and environment (Pine and Gilmore, 1999). However, the experience of wood cultural resources consists mostly of educational experiences such as learning the necessity of using wood, wood-related knowledge, and acquiring information about wood. It is necessary to overcome this limited experience provision and develop varied content that mixes the elements of experience, more so as the younger generation places greater importance on entertainment and getaway.

For the question of what is necessary to increase the popularity of wood cultural resources, the response rate for strengthening the promotion of wood culture was the highest at 32.6%, followed by human resource training and infrastructure support (25.6%), development of related content (24.6%), and establishment of policies related to wood culture (16.8%). Although wood cultural resources were academically classified into the seven categories detailed above and examples of each item have been presented (Han et al., 2021), a systematic strategy including detailed action plans to improve awareness is needed in a situation where the public’s awareness of wood cultural resources is limited to traditional cultural heritage.

Table 5 presents the results of the survey on the participation of the general public in the experience of wood cultural resources divided into seven categories. Among the seven types of wood cultural resources, cultural facilities are places where one can enjoy wood culture, such as wood culture experience centers, wood workshops, and wood culture museums; however, in this survey, participation in playing with wood for children was investigated rather than cultural facilities. Cultural facilities were replaced with playing with wood to analyze the characteristics of the companion who participated in the experience with the respondent in the two experiences of playing with wood and cultural education, and the participation rate according to the age of the youngest child. The survey results show that experience using wood products was the highest at 56.2%, followed by wood cultural heritage experience (24.9%), experience of architecture of wood (24.8%), wood cultural festivals (20.1%), playing with wood experience (15.7%), wood cultural contents (11.5%), and wood cultural education (7.7%). With regard to experiences of wood cultural resources, most of the respondents participated with their families including children in the six types except for wood education. The companions who participated in the playing with wood experience together with the respondent were mostly families including children (59.5%). The proportion of individuals who participated in wood education alone without a companion was 30.1%, and the proportion of those who came with families including children was 26.4%. The age of the youngest child who was a companion of the respondent who had participated in playing with wood was investigated in the order of elementary school students, 7 years old and younger, and middle and high school students. Meanwhile, among the respondents who had participated in wood education, more men participated alone without a companion and more women participated with their family including children. Although there is a difference in the general public’s experience of participating in wood cultural resources, so far the results on the importance of wood cultural resources are similar to those of the questionnaire on the intention to use wood cultural resources in the future.

On investigating the participation and frequency of use of wood culture resources over 1 year according to the seven types among the people who have experienced wood cultural resources, the participation rate for wood cultural education, which had the lowest participation rate, was found to have the highest participation frequency in a year (Table 6). While 70%–80% of respondents said that they participated only 1–2 times a year for the other 6 types of wood culture resources, 37% of the respondents participated more than 2–3 times in 6 months for wood cultural education. Examples of wood cultural education with high participation frequency include woodworking education such as DIY and national and private certification courses.

Table 7 presents the results of a multi-response investigation on the main method of obtaining information for experiencing wood cultural resources. It was found that most information on wood cultural resources was obtained from the Internet (blogs), TV, acquaintances, and institutional websites. For cultural content produced using media such as movies, games, animation, and broadcasting, the importance of TV was higher than for other types, whereas for cultural education, technical books and introduction from an acquaintance was relatively more important than TV and the Internet.

Based on the survey results on participants’ satisfaction with wood cultural experience activities that they participated in most recently (average score on a 5-point scale), overall satisfaction received a score of 3.88 points (Table 8). The intention to participate again in the wood cultural experience activity received 3.99 points, and the intention to recommend it to others received 3.94 points. However, the sufficiency of prior information that was investigated together with the satisfaction of the experience measured very low at 3.50 points. Satisfaction with the program experienced was investigated in order of composition and content, running time, textbooks and teaching materials, and facilitator.