Lascco, Vauxhall, London

One of my favourite places in London is Lascco the Architectural reclaimer's based in Vauxhall. I often take students here to look at the wide variety of pieces for sale whether from an Interior Styling angle or from a Commercial Retail context. This is also a great example of recycling and sustainability and perfect for those Eco projects one may have lined up. Lascco is housed within Brunswick House, the former home of the Dukes of Brunswick and built in 1758. Sadly, it now teeters on the edge of new private high rise blocks which seem to be almost nudging the building out of the way, however the building makes a stand and appears quite defiant against these urban mega structures, and is determined not to be moved and I particularly like that about it. Anyway, the selection of products is quite magnificent and very much reminds me of Anthropologie. In fact, looking back through my archives of images there are spaces within Lassco which look almost identical to the store which only opened a few months ago. Coincidence? Possibly. However, if you want to be inspired, find new ideas and touch a bit of History go along to Vauxhall and have a look yourself. I can guarantee you will be amazed.

Museum of Branding, Packaging and Advertising

I recorded this while on a recent visit to the Museum of Branding, Packaging and Advertising here in London, although I cant actually remember what this 'thing' is is called. Essentially it is a concertinaed structure which is viewed through a tiny reveal at the front of the structure which gives the impression of a 'scene' through a space - if that makes sense. The reason I have recorded this is because I thought it was an incredible concept for a commercial space. Unfortunately the images are not very clear due to the nature of how it is viewed, however as commercial spaces, by their very nature are transitory (or at least should be) I thought this was an innovative and useful way of changing the space without the enormous cost of a re-build or re-fit?

Create Your Space workshop: Moscow

A little while ago I was invited to Moscow to give a talk and run a workshop around Interior Design for students at a conference centre close to the GUM shopping mall and Red square. My initial thought was how I could run a workshop in such an enormous event that would engage such a huge audience? The organisers didn't want me to simply talk to the audience about Interior Design and my knowledge of Russian embarrassingly consists of two words. Therefore, everything that I did say in English was followed by several minutes of translation into Russian. It is not the easiest thing to concentrate on what you are saying, waiting for it to be translated, and then pick up where you were, however after years of having to do this you do develop the knack. Anyway, I decided that I would put together a workshop and presentation which I called 'Create your space' where students were given some basic materials and guidelines and invited to literally create their own space. Some of the results can be seen below. What is so interesting about these is how different each and every 'model' is. We had hundreds of them too which we laid out across the auditorium for the audience to view, including the Mayor of Moscow. What about the presentation? I hear you ask. Well, not everything went according to plan, some things got lost in translation and the organisers had decided to cancel the projector and screen as they didn't think I would need it. The presentation therefore, (and my toes are curling as I write this), had to be done from a laptop to an audience the size of a mini Olympic stadium. Well these things do happen occasionally no matter how prepared we are and they might well happen again in the future, we just have to learn to dance quicker on the rug, I suppose?

See it....Buy it.....Like it....Try it....

A few years ago, a colleague and I worked together on a Final show for our students. We found ourselves with the task of designing the invitation for the exhibition and after many hours brainstorming ideas we came up with this solution. Bearing in mind the student work was based around commercial interiors we set about listing all of the experiences one would have on a shopping journey combining this with the student experience of the course (in Pink)

After the event we found ourselves with quite a sizable collection of left over postcards and rather than waste them, we decided that wherever we travelled we would post the cards back to the University, hence increasing the sense of journey. I am not sure where we were going with the idea and quite what we were going to do with the 'posted' cards, however these random ideas do often come to mind and maybe one day I will decide what I am going to do with them all..!

Learning from Dubai.......up and down the Sheik Rashid Bin Waleed Al Mahktoum Road

One of my favourite books is Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's Learning From Las Vegas. Venturi and Brown took their Architecture students to Las Vegas in the late 1960's as part of a much larger research project. What is so interesting about the book is how they began to deconstruct the whole city and record what they call the Iconography of Urban sprawl into its component parts. For example, directional space, scale, speed, symbol, billboards, illuminated signage and my favourite, the decorated shed i.e. hot dog stands in the shape of a hot dog. On a recent visit to Dubai, I have tried to identify the equivalent of what Venturi calls the 'strip'. Of course in a place such as Dubai there is not such thing yet, but what I did is to identify a main route - in this, case the Sheik Rashid Bin Waleed Al Mahktoum Road which runs from the original city to the megastructures around Jemeirah. Naturally Dubai is not as established in the same way as Vegas but these are examples of what Venturi refers to as the Architecture of Persuasion.

Developing a more informed creative process

Creativity is a very personal quality and naturally differs in each of us. The creative talent of the individuals working within retail organisations can help to drive them [the organisations] creatively forward and indeed forward creatively. There are of course many ways we can adopt creative processes that may include Brainstorming exercises, Lateral thinking, random word association, journey techniques etc. and each retailer will no doubt have adopted its own working methods. This may also include the perhaps unhealthier and far less creative approach of the ‘silo’ method, i.e. working in isolation of anyone and anything else.
We may all feel that other retailers and especially design teams are more creative than us, but perhaps this is a good indication of the differing approaches to being creative and how this may or may not be encouraged or supported within our own commercial organisations? I do believe we all have the capability to be creative whether this is nurture or nature of course there are an awful lot of theories ‘out there’ debating this. What influences creativity is something that I am particularly interested in and how creative processes can be developed that will inform the future of design, therefore providing a ‘better’ creative output whether on the High Street, in store, or within the out of town mega-monolithic contemporary retail emporiums perpetually under construction.
Perhaps the first stage that needs to be addressed is to identify where the problems are. This needs to be clear otherwise the strategy will be confusing. Secondly, investigation of initial ideas and concepts needs to take place perhaps through brainstorming and including all of the Design team.
One of the techniques that I use is a journey technique. On a recent trip to Rome with my students I issued some of them with a disposable camera. They had to resist the temptation of taking photographs of each other and focus more on abstract images found on their journey. I initially took them from Termini station (the main station in Rome) walking them to the Coliseum. Leaving them at the Coliseum they handed over all of their maps and I asked them to begin to navigate their way through the city back to the hotel situated near to Termini station following signs and anything that they remembered that was of significance on their walk from the main station. I also gave the group a list of words which included energy, flexible, focus, texture, signage, graphics, metamorphosis, space, identity etc. to keep in their minds while they recorded their images.
The quality of the images were by no means not perfect, however this was not important, the ideas and what they were recording was far more pertinent and potent. The below illustrates just two of the groups’ journeys recorded in no more than thirty exposures, some had less.

The third stage is idea and concept development. How can this be done? Essentially what the students had produced were a series of what I call cognitive maps, however they were acquiring knowledge without realising what they were doing or why they were doing it. From a Design perspective what this exercise did achieve was the creation of a visual diary that encouraged the students to look at the vast resources around and available to them and encouraging them to investigate primary resources rather than relying on Internet search engines or other secondary resources such as magazines that they were later able to draw on as inspiration for future projects and therefore designing far more informed solutions to Design problems.
The work environment of course needs to be considerate of the importance of this process. An uninspiring, aggressive environment can only illustrate its effects with lower productivity (whether creative or not) both physically and mentally. Improved creative output within the Design departments with the adoption of creative processes will benefit whole teams but do need to be adopted and used frequently to ensure that they are at the forefront of our minds when a problem needs to be solved. Retailers ultimately of course will have to decide whether they employ naturally creative employees or look to develop existing employees and utilising the creative processes available to them. Finally, I do sincerely believe that encouraging and supporting environments which have more people with more ideas who are able to express these is surely integral to greater innovation within Design, and an energetic and far more successful retailer with satisfied customers?

Creating Visually Stimulating Environments

The sense of journey from private spaces to public places and on to private / public retail spaces has always held a fascination for me. Where do people meet before they go shopping? Why do we go to a particular store and not another? What makes things sell? What first attracts us to a brand? Of course a whole plethora of research, theories, theories of the theories, research of the theories and so on exists to answer these questions and indeed many more. There does however remain an emotional response to these journeys, a kind of there-are-some-emotions-which-have-no-words scenario that particularly interests me.

When designing, producing commercial spaces or installing a visual merchandising concept, for example it can be particularly easy to apply motifs or plagiarise by lifting from already established and published imagery, however I encourage my students to look beyond these and apply a much deeper level of research and thinking through unravelling their initial ideas before applying them into the commercial spaces that they design.

During a period of research of public art in 1992 I first came across the Rock Garden in Chandigarh, India. This of course was pre-internet days where ease of access to such information took hours pouring over documents and publications in libraries. It was a another 11 years before my first visit to Chandigarh at the foot of the Himalayas on a round trip from New Delhi, taking several hours by car driving on the bumpy roads of Rajasthan and the Punjab. Indians are particularly proud of Chandigarh, which is probably the greenest city – in the sense of landscape rather than recycling – in the whole of India and the Rock Garden the most visited place in India after the Taj Mahal.
Built by Nek Chand beginning in the early 1950’s in a clearing of the woods on the edge of 'Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh' and new vision of urban planning. Chand created an ‘illegal’ oasis from found objects that include broken crockery, bangles, light sockets and stones, creating an inspirational and fascinating environment. Paths of polished rounded stones and walls completely covered in broken cups and plates guide you through the spaces. Rounded doorways so low that you have to bend down to pass through – apparently to ensure that you bow to the ever present ‘Gods’ to then be greeted by ‘Sculptured terraces’ of strangely shaped animals covered with coloured bangles, an abstract concrete forms applied to surfaces.
What does the all have to do with commercial space design you may well be asking yourself? Certainly Chand was uneducated and influences of the great masters of Art and Design were completely unknown to him and therefore perhaps he was in that respect ‘untainted’ by these influences. However what he seems to have done is to create a visually stimulating environment from an emotional response in its purest form and from which we can learn a great deal when working in a retail environment and creating our exciting commercial spaces. While I do not suggest that everyone cover the walls of their 'spaces' in broken electrical sockets or crockery from the home ware department or create mystical creatures from found objects – these kind of things only really work well in the environments in which they were discovered and of course that would be plagiarism and applying the motif, for me at least, this should be avoided at all cost. We could therefore look perhaps holistically at how Chand created such a variety of different environments through the use of different materials, water, shapes, spaces, forms and repetition of these. Of course there is no electrical lighting deftly creating highlights in this environment, no obvious focal points or hovering sales assistants and no obvious attempt to sell you a product (after all there are none, but that is an interesting concept in itself) What he does do is take you on a journey through spaces each one completely different and yet seamlessly joined. What would be interesting to see is how we can use the essence of what he achieved as inspiration not through the obvious routes of merely covering objects in mosaics and planting them a store window but perhaps scratch a little deeper and take our customers on a journey of experience and excitement.
There are of course plenty of examples of retailers already doing this out there, else where or at least somewhere, but as standardisation of retail environments, mega superstructured shopping malls becomes ever more prevalent I do fear for the future of these exciting journeys to and through retail spaces and the creation of visually stimulating environments within them.