Ex 3

I felt that in order to design a retail store I had to understand how consumers think. So I did some research into consumer psychology .

I came across an online book forgot the title, but I'll post that later, that made some good points into what makes a successful online retail store. Apparently it is online retail stores that have a community that does the best. These retail stores provide forums, customer / editor reviews, and areas where the consumers can converse with one another.

Some facts:

Online communities are among the most trafficked websites. 6 out of the 20 most visited sites are community based. (i.e Second life, Amazon...)

One-third of visitors to e-commerce sites used community features. Two-thirds of all purchases made at online retail stores are from these people.

I realized that in order for an online retail store or even a physical store to succeed they need to have some basis of community. People don't simply buy a product they buy the product for the experience it can offer.

If interaction in the online virtual store is so vital for its success, why is it that in the physical store there is so little interaction among the consumers? How would you get the consumers to interact with one another? This is where architecture comes into play whether it may be to convince or force consumers to interact with one another.

How does the architecture do that?

I've come to the conclusion that you can't really force people to interact with one another. You can only convince them.

Hillier said that "human behavior has its own spatial forms-encountering, congregating, avoiding, interacting, dwelling, teaching..." Basically the activities that people do has their own spatial patterns.

To visualize how these interactions create spatial patterns I did the following






This is a stab at how the virtual store would look like. Looks like a molecule. This is exactly how I envisioned the virtual space. Clusters, little solar systems, where consumers are densely packed around the communal areas.



This is an application available at sodaplay.com. You can play with the application. Change mass, polarity, how many balls there are and so on. Its doesn't represent exactly how I envisioned how my virtual store would be, but it sort of gets the point across.

So I have an idea of how my virtual store looks, but how am I going to relate this to my physical store. How is it going to determine how the consumers interact within the store.

Having had come to the conclusion that I can't force the consumers to interact with one another I decided against having the store be kinematic. Instead I opted to try and immerse them in the community rich world on the web. So my store would be an area where there are a series of projectors projecting in real time the online community. Upon your entering the store you are also given a virtual identity which participates within the virtual world as you choose to do in the real world. Also in an effort to try and convince the consumers to interact with one another the floor will have sensors which will track your movement and those of others in the store. Paths will light up leading to different departments of the store as well as other consumers within their proximity. The information being tracked within the store will be projected on to the facade of the building.