Shaping the experience

Ten years ago I led a project to design a 2000 sqm electronic store in Dubai's Diera City Centre mall. The shop was called Plug-ins,  I was at Portland Design Associates and the client was Al Futtaim.

The brief was to create a new customer focused store that enhanced the shopping experience, allowed products to be tried, and so build a retail destination. This was something largely unheard of at the time in Dubai, which in the electronics market adopted the approach of pile it high, sell fast and cheap. We worked on a principle that as much as possible should be live and planned the departments around the sound, vision, computing and games product to enable that.

The language of the store drew from that of consumer advertising - atmospheric, active and engaging. As the months past and we had feedback on how the store was performing I remember being struck by the impact that empowering customers with apparent accessible, self initiated discover. Our job was though to create a scheme which in fact led them to discover.

David Clare