Experience design in city-based future retail innovation: A bookstore case study approach

As an indivisible part of urban life, the evolution of physical stores reflects the ever-changing urban lifestyle which keeps adapting with the development of society, the economic and technology. The role city-based retail stores play in people’s daily life has moved from physical material provider to spiritual fulfilment supporter. Experience design becomes essential to future city-based retailing innovation. The author has been conducting research on design for future retailing for the last three years from 2017, collected and visited over one hundred city-based retail stores in Europe and S.E. Asia, and identified cases which innovatively break the conventional setting of the types of stores such as everyday use, lifestyle, leisure food, and bookstores. Surprisingly, in the era of internet and digitalization, bookstores are a perfect example which did disappear but evolved to become more diversify and merged with other services into new retailing business models. In this paper, the author selected five representative bookstore cases from in-depth primary research data to discuss and present a range of retail experiences achieved through human-centred design thinking. The bookstore cases are representing the spectral of retail experiences that new structured retail business could bring values to customers from functional, emotional, and spiritual. During further analysis with the framework of design value for business innovation which author developed from previous studies, the author developed a matrix to articulate the different kinds of experience design directions which would be applied as powerful design thinking method to not only retail but wider business innovation decision making processes.