Adrift in a shopping maze: it's a successful no-exit strategy
"Alan Penn, director of the Virtual Reality Centre for the Built Environment at University College London, has come to a conclusion that Ikea stores are 'designed just like a maze'. In doing so he's given scholarly validation to a feeling that will have occurred to many shoppers as they blunder around the blue and yellow hangar looking for a new TV unit only to emerge with two candles, a wok and a bottle of lingonberry cordial.
Penn went on to suggest that it was Ikea's strategy to keep customers inside the store for the maximum time possible. They achieve this by setting a route round the store from which it's difficult to deviate. Taking the shortcuts (which are only there to conform with fire regulations) often leaves you adrift in a sea of lampshades.
The effect is to boost impulse purchases. See a coathanger, and you might buy 'because the layout is so confusing you know you won't be able to go back and get it later'."
(Ian Tucker, 30 January 2011, The Observer, Guardian News and Media Limited)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Wayfinding: the organization and communication of our dynamic relationship to space and the environment
"Wayfinding is the organization and communication of our dynamic relationship to space and the environment. Successful design to promote wayfinding allows people to: (1) determine their location within a setting, (2) determine their destination, and (3) develop a plan that will take them from their location to their destination. The design of wayfinding systems should include: (1) identifying and marking spaces, (2) grouping spaces, and (3) linking and organizing spaces through both architectural and graphic means."
(Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access, School of Architecture and Planning, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Horizontal and Vertical Discourses
"Horizontal Discourse
We are all aware and use a form of knowledge usually typified as everyday or "common sense" knowledge. Common because all potentially or actually have access to it, common because it applies to all, and common because it has a common history in the sense of arising out of common problems of living and dying. This form has a group of well known features: it is likely to be oral, local, context dependent and specific, tacit, multi-layered and contradictory across but not within contexts. However, from the point of view to be taken here, the crucial feature is that is it segmentally organised. By segmental I am referring to the sites of realisation of this discourse. The realisation of this discourse varies with the way the culture segments and specialises activities and practices. The knowledge is segmentally differentiated. Because the discourse is Horizontal it does not mean that all segments have equal importance, clearly some will be more important than others. I shall contrast this Horizontal discourse with what I shall call a Vertical discourse.
Vertical Discourse
Briefly a Vertical discourse takes the form of a coherent, explicit and systematically principled structure, hierarchically organised as in the sciences, or it takes the form of a series of specialised languages with specialised modes of interrogation and specialised criteria for the production and circulation of texts as in the social sciences and humanities. I want first of all to raise the question of how knowledge circulates in these two discourses. In the case of Vertical discourse there are strong distributive rules regulating access, regulating transmission and regulating evaluation. Circulation is accomplished usually through explicit forms of recontextualising affecting distribution in terms of time, space and actors. I am not here concerned with the arenas and agents involved in these regulations. Basically, circulation is accomplished through explicit recontextualisation and evaluation, motivated by strong distributive procedures. But how does knowledge circulate in the case of Horizontal discourse where there is little systematic organising principles and therefore only tacit recontextualising? Of course in Horizontal discourse there are distributive rules regulating the circulation of knowledge, behaviour and expectations according to status/position. Such distributive rules structure and specialise social relations, practices and their context and local agents of its enactment and begin to circulate? - A Horizontal discourse entails a set of strategies which are local, segmentally organised, context specific and dependent, for maximising encounters with persons and habitats."
(Basil Bernstein 2000, p.157)
Bernstein, Basil. (2000). Pedagogy Symbolic Control and Identity Theory Research Critique. Oxford, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
