Young Designers 2011

		Young Designers 2011
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Roopali Sood | roopali.capri@gmail.com

Interactive Retail Experience for Philips Light Lounge

New Media Design | PGDPD
Guide: Tanishka Kachru;Dr Jignesh Khakhar
Sponsor: Philips Design India Ltd., Gurgaon

Keywords
Interactive-retail
User experience design
Ambient space
Immersive environment

For this project, I had to create a complete immersive experience that would not just awe and inform people but influence buying decisions by solving practical problems through the use of design concepts. It had to influence customers who have lighting needs, laymen as well as professionals.
I followed a two-pronged strategy to conduct systematic research. I pored over the existing literature, books and the internet and I also used site visits, participant observations, contextual analysis and other methodologies to gather first-hand data.
Mindmaps were used to assimilate and consolidate the information. The maps made for an impactful infographic that facilitated brainstorming. A couple of concepts were deduced and documented in the form of scribbles and rough sketches. A customer journey template was made to abstract the complexities involved in a typical purchase cycle in order to map our ideas corresponding to the different stages in the template. The concepts were then filtered out based on their feasibility, applicability and the possibility of implementating them. Finally, all the concepts were integrated under the umbrella of The Experiential Lighting Lounge.
At the outset, I went into the depth of cutting edge technologies used in interactive retail and read many success stories. I started laying too much emphasis on the tools used to achieve a particular interaction. It was much later when I realized the crux of the problem lay not in designing the interaction but in being able to abstract the needs of all the stakeholders and designing a solution that kept their interests at core.