Publication: Mall Futures

Mall Futures is a design project a few colleagues and I worked. Here's the publication.

Changing the Mall Experience

Building on last semester’s studio project, I’m exploring creative and alternative uses for retail spaces. Specifically, I will bring attention to vacancies within malls by intelligently attracting people to stop and engage with a space they are normally diverted from. An underlying goal is to prove that foot traffic can be retained near vacant store fronts with the addition of interactive displays.

Mall Futures - Redacted

A redacted version of our research and design solutions for solving vacancies that have been appearing in malls over the past decade and a half. An essay concerning my experiences while working on this design team can be found here. You can open the publication to take a closer look.

Open publication - Free publishing - More mall futures

The Shopping Mall and the Design Process

Approached by a certain mall developer, they proposed a project that would have the design team creatively re-envision the future use of the shopping mall and vacant mall spaces. Throughout the course of the project, the design team became aware of the client's self-perceptions, analogies, and words used to convey their ideas and business plans. While collaborating with the client, the project proposal changed. It now incorporated informational design of the client's business language. Information design, a human centered designer's bread and butter, is the process of making sense of the bigger picture and succinctly conveying these ideas both visually and verbally. In essence, it involves storytelling to persuade the client to understand who they are, what they do, and how they do it from a different perspective. The following paragraphs recount my experiences and viewpoint as part of this design team.

The design team's first step was to dive into historical research in order to understand the origins of the mall and the shopping mall as we know it today.