Innholdsfortegnelse for September - October 2021 i Frame

What’s the purpose of brick-and-mortar stores? The past year has made it clearer than ever that we don’t need to visit a store to buy things. We can shop at home, on the road and in the office. So why go to a store at all? For services that we can’t get at home, like advice, the opportunity to try on clothes or to have things repaired. But what role will stores play in a society that, according to researchers, is less and less about buying products and more and more about spending money on experiences? The simple answer: stores will have to offer experiences. Experiential retail is a term that’s been batted about for years. But the question is still what type of experience is relevant for retailers. First…

Either by necessity or a reframing of life goals, the pandemic has had a dramatic impact on entrepreneurship. Many lost their jobs, while others realized they’d rather not returns to roles that just weren’t fulfilling them. As a result, starting a new business, for many, became a key aspiration. According to data from Clearview Research’s Youth Employment 2030 report, 58 per cent of young adults in England said they would pursue entrepreneurship and 13 per cent have already started a side hustle since the beginning of the first lockdown. Meanwhile, a study run by members’ club Allbright found that one in four women are setting up their own business as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, while three quarters of women (74 per cent) feel inspired to do so. This…

When our contributing workspace editor Riya Patel explored how a number of tech giants were planning their office comebacks (see page 20), she found that many of their employees weren’t planning to come back at all – or at least not full-time, anyway. Already at the start of the pandemic, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told his employees that around half of them could anticipate working from home permanently over the coming five to ten years. Google expects over half of its 140,000 employees to work part-time in the office, and another one-fifth to work from home permanently, a sentiment solidified with a tweet from CEO Sundar Pichai: ‘The future of work at Google is flexibility.’ This phenomenon doesn’t just apply to the tech sector, either. Kate Lister, president of Global…

Last year we wrote about the fact that Amazon’s investment in automated retail clearly looked set to benefit from the pandemic. Indeed, in March, the company opened its first store outside of the US, in London’s Ealing Broadway, with four more London arrivals within as many months. It also stood to reason that other brands would be quick to follow up on what was a somewhat underinvested area of retail near-futurism, often in tandem with the e-commerce giant. In the last half year, airport retailers Cibo Express Gourmet Markets and Hudson News have been some of the first to adopt Amazon’s white-label version of the Just Walk Out technology that powers its Go and Fresh stores. Others are looking beyond Amazon’s ecosystem. The last year or so has seen French…

Spanish sanitary product manufacturer Roca has edited the toilet’s forms down to essentials, adding technical features that improve hygiene and user-friendliness. In-Wash® In-Tank® has a tank incorporated into the bowl itself, eliminating the need for a cistern – a quality that both saves space and makes installation and maintenance easier. New advances in design and materials have given way to an optimal sanitary experience, especially ideal in our postpandemic age, when hygiene and cleanliness are prioritized like never before. Available in floor-standing and wall-hung versions, In-Wash® In-Tank® is an unobtrusive addition to any bathroom space. Its technologies also make it suited to meeting greater sanitation needs: Providing users with a thorough water wash and drying, the integrated removable nozzle also cleans itself before and after each use for maximum disinfection.…

IAN JOHNSTON QUININE ‘As an easy option, the merging of food and retail will continue to grow, although I’m not sure it can be pushed much further. But it definitely can if you take the purer essence of hospitality – “the friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests and strangers” – and embody those qualities in store.’ KATE SHEPHERD THE FUTURE COLLECTIVE ‘Certainly. The pandemic has sparked a whole host of unmet needs among consumers, many of which could be serviced by retailers and brands branching out into other areas of hospitality and leisure. The winners will be those who meet the more practical and genuine needs of their customers while demonstrating empathy and care. It could be as simple as the napping stations Casper became famous for, or…

KATE SHEPHERD THE FUTURE COLLECTIVE ‘It’s definitely a very clever way for brands and retailers seeking to elevate their in-store experience, increase dwell time and create more of a destination. The best examples that spring to mind are in the beauty, fashion and department store sectors, but that’s not to say we couldn’t see brands in other sectors innovating in this area – it’s relatively uncharted territory in tech, for example.’ IAN JOHNSTON QUININE ‘Putting a coffee shop or restaurant in a store is not a clever strategy – it may work for some, but not for everyone. But layering a hospitality mindset – not necessarily via a café or food – through your whole experience is smart and will work for every brand, as long as it’s crafted in…

Venetians chatting about the sightings of dolphins in the Canal Grande during lockdown, kids playing in the campi, and a boat always coming along when the football splashes down into the water. The pandemic has rid La Serenissima of mass tourism, and I glimpse the renaissance of another city on the eve of the Biennale’s opening. There’s undoubtedly a special reason to stage the Biennale of Architecture here. Not as an alibi for the cacophonous traffic, pollution, segregation, sprawl and hectic consumerism in other world cities, but as a model for a future that has advanced past the industrial age and embraced shared experiences and the creating of community. Isn’t the true aspiration of architects to go beyond the trite, mundane, repetitive building of a status quo and create mirages…

Montreal’s burgeoning design scene continues to garner international attention. A slew of autonomous craft-led makers and boutique brands have joined the city’s crop of groundbreaking architects who make strong statements with the city’s plethora of public spaces, restaurants, stores and offices. There’s an inherent appetite for the bold and unconventional. At the precipice of this movement is Ivy Studio. The collaborative practice was founded in 2018 by four young architects – David Kirouac, Guillaume B Riel, Gabrielle Rousseau and Philip Staszewski – looking to break out of jobs at traditional firms and develop an approach all of their own. They talk about designing retail concepts and workspaces that help companies define their image, the power of an uncompromised approach in a post-Covid-19 world, and the agility that comes from running…

Founded by Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, EcoLogicStudio is a London-based architecture and urban design practice specialized in environmental design, urban self-sufficiency and building integrated nature. For almost two decades, the team has created projects and prototypes that demonstrate the transformative potential of combining different types of intelligence – ecological, human, technological and more. According to Pasquero and Poletto, learning from nature’s intricate systems isn’t just about ensuring human survival on this planet in the face of climate change. More than that, it’s key to ensuring a good life on this planet – one that benefits all living things. The term ‘biodigital design’ comes up quite frequently around your work. What do you mean by this, and what can it teach us? MARCO POLETTO: Traditionally, designers have taken inspiration from…

The term ‘experiential retail’ has been thrown around a lot over the past decade. And in the post-pandemic period, one strategy to achieve it has gained new relevance: hospitality-infused retail. Yes, hospitality suffered just as much as retail in 2020/21, but it’s arguably much more likely to bounce back quickly as people return to socializing, holidaying and wining and dining – outside of their homes, for a change. ‘The main reason the hospitality industry took a huge hit during that time was because government policy forced it to close, not because consumer demand abated,’ says Ian Johnston, founder and creative director of research, strategy and design consultancy Quinine, pointing to an article in The Guardian that in the UK in May, retail sales actually fell as people focused on dining…

‘There’s no doubt that weaving hospitality offers into the retail experience naturally creates longer dwell time,’ says Kate Shepherd of The Future Collective. And surely the longer the hospitality experience – a boozy lunch or sit-down dinner instead of a takeaway coffee, for instance – the longer the dwell time. This is something with which British fashion and luxury goods boutique Browns has been experimenting, first through the inclusion of a pop-up café in its Browns East concept space in London’s Shoreditch, and now with a more extensive addition to its Browns Brook Street flagship. Native at Browns is an on-site closed-loop restaurant by two wild food pioneers: head chef Ivan Tisdall-Downes and Imogen Davis. ‘We know that retail today is about more than the product,’ says Lee Whittle, customer…

‘Old houses were scaffolding once and workmen whistling.’ When T.E. Hulme wrote this almost a century ago, he couldn’t have imagined a world plagued by a deadly virus leading to a mass exodus of those whistling workmen from their shanty dwellings in the city to their seasonally abandoned rural homes. The scaffoldings stood tirelessly under the brunt of city heat, red tiles glinting in a dusty corner, as the country went into its first lockdown. The face of the Indian construction industry, which was already struggling with poor management and a lack of tracking of its labour force, lost its central rein completely as Covid-19 spread across the nation in April 2020 (echoing T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, ‘April is the cruelest month’), bringing the industry to a major halt.…

YU TING: As designers, we often see the world from the perspective of a healthy person: after all, we assume that we’re going to be strong in mind and body to do our work. But in recent years, because of illness in my family, I’ve started to see that so many of the spaces that we traverse every day are not suited to the needs of people who aren’t able-bodied. It’s critical to imagine the world from the vantage point of the audience I’m designing for. When I started designing spaces for children, I realized that my daughter, who was young at the time, saw her surroundings very differently from me, as an adult who’s 1.78 m tall. I’ve become more concerned with the human body and how it interacts…

The second Roaring Twenties: Judging by a myriad of recent news headlines, the post-pandemic period is predicted to give rise to an explosion of prosperity and positivity. As history has taught us, the gloomiest times are often followed by years of social, artistic and cultural dynamism. In the hospitality industry, we’re witnessing the (re)opening of venues that set out to unburden and excite visitors with bright and bold oases. Energetic and hyper photogenic, cheery and upbeat, these spaces aim to rekindle the carefree, adventurous and spontaneous flame within their guests, which was stifled during lockdown and isolation. ‘In this post-Covid world we live in, uncomplicated enjoyment is one of the things that we most crave. Reconnecting with friends, laughing together, and mobile phones off,’ says Patricia Bustos, the interior designer…

Halfway to boiling point. That’s the temperature with which some places on the planet are now having to grapple. And not just places with ominous names like Furnace Creek in California’s Death Valley – whose recent 54.4°C reading is one of the hottest ever reliably recorded on Earth – but also populous cities like Portland and Seattle. In June, Portland charted an all-time-high of 46.7°C, setting a new record for the third day in a row, while Seattle’s thermometer reached the 42.2°C mark. Not long after came the news that the Amazon rainforest, once a carbon sink, is now emitting more carbon dioxide than it can absorb. While some of the emissions are the result of intentionally burning off areas for meat farming, they’re contributed to by rising temperatures and…

A recipient of this year’s AIGA’s 50 Books | 50 Covers competition, ARCHITECTURE IS A SOCIAL ACT: Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects [LOHA] addresses how the discipline can be used as a tool to engage in politics, economics, aesthetics and smart growth by promoting social equity, human interaction and cultural evolution. €39 LEGACY Generations of Creatives in Dialogue Legacy is a star-studded, cross-generational compendium of key conversations with and between some of the most revered creative minds in recent history. It prompts a radical reappraisal of how we examine the concept of influence as an empowering call to action, one ultimately aimed at furthering innovation and intrepid experimentation. €39 WHERE WE WORK Design Lessons from the Modern Office The office isn’t dead. But just in what form will it live? As we…

01 THINK TERMINOLOGY, NOT TYPOLOGY When speaking of spatial design, ‘hospitality’ often refers to the type of project: café, bar, restaurant, hotel and so on. Retail brands wanting to infuse hospitality into their spaces might do better to focus on the other definition, that of the friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests and strangers, and weave it through their projects. 02 FOLLOW THE BRAND INSTEAD OF THE CROWDS It’s easy to install a coffee shop inside a store, but is it the right strategy? Any extensions need to elevate the core offer and help customers better connect with the brand. Can a hospitality addition – from the concept right down to the details – help to strengthen its sustainability ethos, for example,or reflect its history and traditions or…