FUTURE RETAIL EXPERIENCE · SERVICE DESIGN · 2026
A retail environment was being reimagined around a broader question: how could it better support the ways people actually spend time there — not only shopping, but navigating, meeting, waiting, resting and asking for help?
I worked across research, journey mapping and experience strategy to translate those behaviours into a connected set of spatial, service and digital opportunities.
ROLE / CONTRIBUTION
Service design · Field research · Journey mapping · Experience strategy · Spatial concepts
A DIFFERENT KIND OF PLACE
A place is never only its intended purpose.
Retail environments are designed around shopping, but people rarely experience them that narrowly.
They arrive early and wait. They meet friends. They look for somewhere to sit, take a call or charge a phone. They ask for directions, entertain children, find a moment of quiet, or simply spend time without buying anything.
That gap between what the place was designed for and how people were already using it became the starting point for the project.
WATCHING THE PLACE IN USE
Looking beyond shopping to understand how people actually use the place.
We started on the ground — observing how people moved through the environment, speaking with visitors and employees, and looking for the moments where the experience became difficult, improvised or unexpectedly useful.
Rather than treating everyone as the same kind of “shopper”, we mapped different needs and journeys to understand how the same place could become a very different experience depending on who was moving through it.
The most useful opportunities were often hiding in behaviours the environment hadn’t been designed for.
FROM BEHAVIOUR TO SYSTEM
Turning everyday behaviour into an experience system.
The research began to reveal a broader opportunity: instead of treating service points, seating, navigation and digital touchpoints as separate improvements, we could think about the experience as one connected system.
I helped translate behaviours and journey needs into experience opportunities — asking what people needed at different moments, where that need should be met, and whether the best response was spatial, human, digital, or a combination of all three.
The question shifted from “What should we put here?” to “What should this moment enable?”
FROM STRATEGY TO EXPERIENCE
An experience can become spatial, service-based, and digital at once.
The strategy became a family of interventions across the environment: places to orient, ask for help, pause, recharge, connect and discover.
Some changed the physical environment. Others changed how support was delivered or how information surfaced. Many worked across layers — combining space, people and technology so that the experience could respond differently depending on what someone needed in that moment.
Rather than designing isolated touchpoints, the aim was to make those layers work together as one experience.
WHAT I TOOK FROM IT
Sometimes the best way to redesign a place is to watch what people are already doing with it.
This project reinforced something I first learned through architecture and later carried into service design: people rarely use environments exactly as intended.
The interesting work begins in that gap — noticing the behaviours a space has not accounted for, understanding the need behind them, and designing an experience that responds across space, service and technology.
A place becomes more useful when it starts responding to the life already happening inside it.