How Imagination Became a Tool for Finding the Missing
By Yoo Seung-chul | February 8, 2026
The Problem That Haunts South Korea
In South Korea, 95 percent of missing children are found within two days. This remarkable statistic—made possible by high CCTV coverage and a system that allows children's fingerprints to be registered in advance—masks a deeper tragedy: roughly 1,300 long-term missing children remain unaccounted for, their cases growing colder with each passing year.
For families of these children, the passage of time becomes an enemy. Memories fade. Photographs yellow. A child's face from a missing persons flyer, captured at age seven, offers little help in recognizing them at age twenty-seven. Investigators face dwindling resources, fading clues, and the psychological weight of unsolved cases. The system that excels at rapid recovery fails the forgotten.
This is where most public service campaigns stop—with the problem clearly stated and resources exhausted. But in October 2024, the National Center for the Rights of the Child (아동권리보장원) and advertising firm Daehong Communications (대홍기획) refused to accept that limitation. Instead, they asked a question that bridged fashion styling, artificial intelligence, and human empathy: What if we showed people not just who the child was, but who they might have become?
The Innovation: Styling as a Search Strategy
The campaign, titled "Runway to Home" (런웨이 투 홈), represents a departure from technology-first approaches to missing persons cases. While previous initiatives—collaborations with the Korean Institute of Science and Technology on age-progression photography and the National Police Agency's missing children photo booths—focused on technical accuracy, "Runway to Home" introduced an element rarely associated with law enforcement: fashion styling.
The insight was deceptively simple. A missing child's appearance depends not only on biological aging but on the choices they make—or the choices made for them. Hairstyle, clothing, accessories, and grooming transform a person's recognizability. A child with long hair might wear it short. A shy child might adopt a bold aesthetic. A teenager who loved oversized sweaters might prefer fitted silhouettes.
By generating multiple styled versions of each missing child—showing them in different outfits, hairstyles, and presentations—the campaign created a gallery of possibilities. Each version told a micro-story: This is how she might look as a student. This is how she might look if she worked in fashion. This is how she might look if she cut her hair short.
The execution was technically sophisticated but emotionally grounded. The campaign used AI to age the children's faces and then applied fashion styling to the results, creating video sequences that showed each child in a runway-like progression. The aesthetic deliberately evoked high fashion—dramatic lighting, professional styling, cinematic presentation—not to trivialize the search, but to elevate the children's visibility and dignity.
Why This Matters: The Psychology of Recognition
The "Runway to Home" approach taps into a well-established principle in cognitive psychology: context-dependent memory. People are more likely to recognize someone when they encounter them in varied contexts rather than a single fixed image. By showing multiple styled versions of each child, the campaign dramatically increased the probability that a viewer would recognize them in real life.
But there is a second, equally important psychological mechanism at work: parasocial connection. When viewers see a missing child styled in different ways, they begin to imagine that child's life trajectory, asking themselves: What does this child like? What kind of person are they becoming? This imaginative engagement transforms the missing child from a statistic into a person—someone whose absence matters.
The campaign's creators understood this. In their statement, they noted that families responded with specific, emotional recognition: "Mom and Dad both wear glasses, so the child probably wears glasses too." "The hairstyle reminds me of my older sister." These responses revealed something crucial: the campaign had moved beyond information delivery into the realm of emotional resonance.
The Execution: Where Media Placement Meets Public Consciousness
What made "Runway to Home" impossible to ignore was not just its message, but where it appeared. The campaign materialized in the places where Seoulites dream—the gleaming corridors of Kyobo Building in Myeongdong, the elegant lobby of Koreana Hotel, the polished floors of LOTTE Department Store, the bustling mall entrances of Jamsil Lotte World, and the darkened theaters of Lotte Cinema.
This was not accidental. The placement strategy recognized something essential: people do not think about missing children in police stations or government offices. They think about them in moments of aspiration—when they are imagining themselves in different clothes, different lives, different futures. By positioning these children in spaces of aspirational imagination, the campaign asked viewers to do something radical: to imagine the missing child not as a tragedy frozen in time, but as a person still becoming.
When a mother walked through Myeongdong and saw her missing daughter styled in a winter coat, her heart stopped. When a father stood in a cinema lobby and recognized his son's mannerisms in a styled version, he wept. These were not moments of data collection. They were moments of recognition and hope—the kind that cannot be measured in percentages but only felt in the chest.
The campaign's impact rippled outward in ways both visible and invisible. Families who had abandoned hope found themselves imagining their children alive, growing, changing. Media outlets that had moved on to other stories returned to cover this one. International observers took notice. But more importantly, something shifted in how South Korea thought about its missing children—not as cold cases, but as unfinished stories.
The Broader Implication: Why Storytelling Matters More Than Strategy
"Runway to Home" succeeds because it recognizes a fundamental truth about modern public service communication: information alone does not drive action. What drives action is narrative, emotion, and the invitation to participate in someone else's story.
This has profound implications for how governments, nonprofits, and institutions approach social challenges. The campaign demonstrates that:
- Aesthetic sophistication is not frivolous—it is functional. By treating the campaign with the visual language of high fashion, the creators ensured it would be noticed, shared, and remembered. In an attention economy, beauty is a form of accessibility.
- Technology should serve empathy, not replace it. AI age-progression has existed for years, but "Runway to Home" succeeded because it used AI as a tool for human connection, not as an end in itself.
- Interdisciplinary collaboration produces innovation. The campaign brought together child welfare experts, advertising creatives, fashion stylists, and technologists. None of these disciplines alone could have conceived it.
- Public service campaigns can be culturally sophisticated. There is no rule that says searching for missing children must be grim or utilitarian. By embracing style and visual storytelling, the campaign honored the children's dignity while maximizing their visibility.
The Ethical Dimension: Consent and Dignity
It is worth noting that the campaign's success rested on a foundation of ethical practice. The National Center for the Rights of the Child worked directly with families of missing children throughout the creative process. The families' input shaped the campaign—their observations about family traits, their emotional responses, their consent—were central to its development.
This stands in contrast to many public service campaigns that treat vulnerable populations as passive subjects. "Runway to Home" treated families as collaborators and co-creators. When a mother recognized her daughter's mannerisms in a styled version, or a father noted inherited features, they were not simply consuming information—they were participating in the search.
Looking Forward: What Happens When We Refuse to Forget
"Runway to Home" did not end in October 2024. It continues, evolving, expanding. Families continue to submit their children's images. Stylists continue to imagine new possibilities. The campaign has become a living archive of hope—a refusal to let these children fade into the background of a busy world.
What makes this campaign remarkable is not that it solved the problem of missing children. It did not. What it did was something perhaps more important: it changed how we think about the problem. It refused the narrative of tragedy and loss. Instead, it offered a narrative of possibility and becoming—the idea that a missing child is not a closed case, but an open story.
For professionals in public service, media, and social innovation, "Runway to Home" offers a quiet lesson: the most powerful tool is not data, but imagination. When you give people permission to imagine someone else's future, you give them permission to care. And when people care, they look. And when they look, sometimes they find.
The missing children of South Korea are waiting. "Runway to Home" suggests that they might be waiting not in police files or missing persons databases, but in the imagination of a stranger who once saw them styled in a winter coat, or a summer dress, or a school uniform—and thought: I know this child. I have seen this child. Let me help bring them home.
