The new temporary and exhibit spaces:
business culture and communications beyond the product,
through planning, temporariness, and design.
by Arturo Dell’Acqua Bellavitis
Full Professor at Politecnico di Milano, Indaco Department Director
and La Triennale di Milano Vicepresident.
The profound and continuous evolution under way in retail spaces, the way to conceive the relationship between product, target audience, brand communications and the industry, are set in complex scenarios with a fluid nature that put in a new relation and at the same time call into question historical and well-established structures.
The most relevant variations that are responsible for the change include the new global trends in the markets and in the purchasing horizons, along with a new consciousness in consumers, the ease in finding and comparing information, a new and changeable notion of the concepts of quality and value – cost, and, fundamental, the influence of “retail entertainment” as well as “eduentertainment”.
These international trends give rise to a cross-fertilization of different sciences and hence to new professional figures open to a multidisciplinary approach and to cross-culturalism.
These relevant trends that everywhere are progressively transforming retail spaces into venues able to entertain, inform, educate in a light and pleasing way, can be gradually depicted in every type of space meant to host a relation between audience, product and services, as is happens for instance in the new exhibiting areas in trade shows, but not only those, and the temporary stores, non conventional spaces such as the guerrilla stores, which change their outline, concept and features.
These new spaces are the result of profound changes in function and concept and are becoming increasingly relevant in trade show and retail industries. They can be considered one of the latest evolutions of the ability to communicate to the public starting from space planning, message, value, quality, but also emotion, entertainment, atmosphere.
In fact today every purchasing experience must be involving, multisensory and gratifying also aesthetically and the temporariness as well as the changeability that focus the public and operators’ attention on these spaces, show how topical and in touch with the latest demands of the market they are.
The “Trade Show” model and Exhibition Design
During the last thirty years the trade show system has changed in function and outline.
There has been a variation in the structures, quarters, and spaces, which is due to a change in the reasons for trade show attendance, which have become more defined, and today more complex and articulated.
It is no more simply a question of “being on the spot”, now it is fundamental to “be on the spot as we are”, with our own global and precise image, with the ability to communicate exactly how we want to be acknowledged.
It is a question of image, but even more of content, values, company’s background, innovation, individuality and uniqueness, due to the competence of the specialised audience involved in trade shows.
Today the exhibit space can be defined as a local unity temporarily representative of the exhibitor’s individuality, and through the architecture as well as the materials, lighting, flux dynamics, chromatic codes and the language of details, it must be able to convey in an immediate and comprehensible way the most advanced degree of the company’s culture and its role and position in the market.
The new exhibition codes and the evolution of spaces
Trade show quarters and the organisers have lately understood the new needs of the industry and the new exhibition codes, and now they offer new technical solutions such as the combination of interior spaces and the personalization of corridors, which allow most prestigious projects with a higher originality and impact both in terms of volume and dimension and architectural quality.
More and more often it is possible to exploit also the areas outside the pavilions, which enables the development of high structure, hence multiplying the traditional height limits that usually are 2.50 – 3 meters.
This sophisticated but more concrete process of values’ expression, suggestion and implementation, which by the way is always evolving internally, is entrusted to designers and of course to design, whose role is always more decisive and transversal in the particular and topical direction of the Exhibition Design.
Temporary Spaces and innovative retail shops: new scenarios and the role of design
Design is the key element in the evolution of retail scenarios, in which during the last years, or rather every day, many of the reference points are continuously evolving: concepts, functions and consequently spaces are modifying and shaped by changes in the market, impulses from marketing, and consumers’ attitudes.
Non-conventional spaces develop which are characterised by temporariness and often by changeability, and are difficult to catalogue or standardize, continuously changing, designed to exist for a few weeks or days.
A condensed timing for spaces that must develop brand identity and an active and effective relationship with the public, between public and product, and that consequently require a complete and conscious approach in planning and implementation.
Guerrilla marketing, emotional marketing and Event Design
Markets that are extremely competitive, globalised, but at the same time increasingly multifaceted and fragmented into extremely “local” niches, require from marketing different strategies of approach and multilevel commercial policies.
The contribution of experiential and emotional marketing coexists with the aggressive techniques of “guerrilla marketing”, and the different product-systems, for example fashion, entertainment, technological products, as well as more immaterial services, meet and exchange codes and the ability to communicate, giving rise to highly innovative retail spaces.
Exclusive and rare concepts exist side by side with guerrilla stores that might stay open, as we said, perhaps only for a few days, while refined and very elegant flegship shops occupying entire buildings control the most elegant and international quarters of globalised cities, in order to represent the brand, not to sell it, which is largely done by minimal or fashionable one-brand outlet stores.
In these years similar transformations can be depicted in the planning of spaces for events: sports, music, art events in which on top of the complex functions of entertaining, the temporary dimension and the link with the outer space, there often is the need of the structures’ transferability and transport.
Every product and service that is offered to the public must speak a language recognisable for its uniqueness, by integrating traditional visual merchandising codes with the latest visual languages.
A great role in this evolution is played by the new materials at the disposal of designers, new architectural lighting devices, sound and perfume diffusers, and new building and assembling technologies.
These competences are complex and under many aspects innovative, and for this reason POLI.design has developed a new course of high standard training centred on these topical sectors, where the cooperation between companies that are attentive to these aspects of the market’s evolution, and designers professionally prepared to comprehend and exploit their codes and potential, may produce important results. For the sake of single companies, designers, but also for the whole system and the culture of the sector.
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