Rethinking Retail Experience

This project set out to explore how retail environments can offer experiences that are rewarding in more ways than they currently do. Using the Selfridges department store in London as a testing ground, a concept for a character-driven emergent narrative iPhone app has been developed. The Selfridges Trails app enables shop visitors to engage with store content in new and more meaningful ways; from following the trail of a celebrity style-icon through to curating their own trail, which can be shared with other app users, or with friends on popular social networks. Over time, as individual user generated content increases within the app, its ability to meet varying needs of shop visitors would improve. The app converges current technology in locative media and online social networking with contemporary emergent narrative theory. Further research is proposed into how such an app may be used in the future to drive the physical layout and design of experience spaces.