Design Practice and Scholarly Research: Combining the Best of Both Worlds

Establishing new academic programs is a long-term process. Short-term but intensive programs, as a summer school for example, are easier in setting up and can also be used as experimental hubs (thinker spaces). To this end, in 2014, we started to organize a summer school in, what we call, ‘Seamless Retail Design’ in cooperation with Technical University of Delft (TUD) and Politectnico di Milano (Polimi). We presented the students with the challenge to create retail environments which seamlessly combine the spatial (physical environment), the digital and the human (experiential) factor. This challenge is not chosen randomly. Indeed, today, three clear phenomena have changed the way retail needs to be done drastically. Firstly, consumers are more aware of their own buying behavior which reflects on their shopping behavior. Secondly, the scarce time people have and want to spend on shopping, they want to spend it in a nice environment (Quartier, 2017). The third phenomenon is related to the digital revolution, which has changed consumer behavior profoundly. Creating holistic and seamless brand experiences, which transcend the boundaries of online and offline channels is crucial (Rigby, 2014; Van Ossel, 2014; van Tongeren, 2013). So, the fundamental change in the context within which retailers will have to function today and in the near future also asks for a different design approach: how we design stores has changed from a merely design perspective to a more multi-disciplinary one (Zimmerman and Teufel, 2015). To this end, we set up the summer school as an experimental environment in which students from different back-grounds and disciplines, though, with a relation to retailing and design (e.g. interior design, architecture, product design, marketing, graphic design and media design), can collectively reflect on the challenges and opportunities of the store of the future.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Teach.2019.49

Volume Editors
Richard Blythe & Johan De Walsche

ISBN
978-1-944214-23-4