Location, Location, Location and...

Apple Stores are not casually placed anywhere. Real estate is an important component of experience design. The definitive phrase was coined in a “1926 real estate classified ad in the Chicago Tribune:

‘Attention salesmen, sales managers:

location, location, location,

close to Rogers Park.’” 

What should designers consider about location awareness to facilitate and enhance an architectural program? What else matters after securing the choice address of treble significance? Here I will point out another triad of location aspects about real estate and experience design.

I developed the Location-cubed Framework at IDEO to describe ergonomic aspects of human awareness in time and space. I used a modified version at Eight Inc. where architecture is a part of almost every human experience project. In my current job at Cooler Screens it is even more important.

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The defining idea behind the Location-cubed Framework is that humans...

1. ...move daily —promenade— through an environment to see or be seen, to miss, display or be displayed to. During that promenade they will have opportunities to...
2. ...move towards, ignore or move away from —consider— objects or agents of interest. Finally they may make a number of stops to...
3. ...interact at close range —engage— with those objects or agents.

I call the space where and when this motion happens, this daily trek, our Daily Landscape. (More on the Daily Landscape concept later below.)

[[[ place graphic here ]]]

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Imagine a valley back in the Paleolithic...

Depending on the valley’s daily content —of safe or dangerous plants, animals, people or landscape features; of subject plants, animals, people or landscape features; and other assorted, inanimate resources— the promenading may have been casual, weary, fearful or ostentatious. The considering thus may have been out-in-the-open or from-hiding-places. And the engaging unfriendly, friendly, casual or planned, slow or fast, obligatory or opportunistic, lengthy, brief, peaceful or violent. A vast number of in-between states and much confusion and surprise colored the resulting plot lines, the narratives about events in our hypothetical valley.

Fast-forward to our so-called Anthropocene. I suggest you may still use the L3 Framework to describe, analyse and explain much about people moving through modern environments. Let’s informally define the three attention modes…

1. Promenading
2. Considering
3. Engaging

MODE ONE: Promenading

Visiting a museum —I propose the soon-to-reopen and meticulously thought-out San Francisco MoMA as exemplar— a basic user behavior is promenading. You simply walk about or through the space, able to enjoy its “architectural content” without making an effort to directly interact with anything. It’s a pleasant environment to simply be in and move through or around. ( Form, function and content perfectly overlapping. ) If this sounds like unproductive behavior it’s definitely not so. Promenading —picking my term from the strung-together-by-a-garden-walk outdoor concerts of mid-18th century London— is an excellent way individuals and communities can, given the chance, share what is of basic practical, social and cultural currency.

Promenading satisfies a basic human need, once a necessity and now an easily neglected accessory to our general well-being. What is the great attractor? Do we miss it more sorely than we realize?

Every original democracy I can think of was predicated on a public space where citizens and their essential adjuncts circulated, participating in private and common business. Weather dictated interior or exterior spaces but as technology allowed, architectural treatments, natural or artificial, enclosing or delineating, evolved to express ritualistic significance and improve operational efficiency. Roman patrons received their clientele at home but promenaded to, around and from the Forum to conduct and be seen conducting business. Totalitarian regimes naturally counter this, proscribing free assembly, draconianly regulating circulation and replacing casual promenading spaces with centrally-controlled parading grounds.

( Media is an extension of our promenade. Being able to casually see, read, write, mark, draw, watch or hear in common —upon skin, dust, mud, bark, wood, shell, stone, paper or pixels— augments our mental and architectural exchange space. )

A modern promenade is biased by peripheral vision and listening plus a state of awareness between daydreaming and deep, unfocused thought. A degree of suspension-of-disbelief similar to that induced by cinema or theater is typical. Such day-dreaming would have been quickly selected out in our hypothetical paleolithic valley. Only recently have we become able to zone-out in relative safety when out and about.

Modern promenading may be so pleasant precisely for being obverse to our original and very dangerous daily treks through territory in search of resources. Or on our way to and from resource-rich areas. The primordial fraught promenade of the hunt, territorial patrol or incursive passage has been tamed into an activity —and a space— inside which we may find simultaneous relaxation and stimulation. Great retailers understand this very well.

Did some version of these ideas guide Théophile Bader and Alphonse Kahn in programming and laying out their distillation of the 1869 Au Bon Marché? They offered more than upper class luxury, momentarily, to a lower class now regularly spending discretionary time and money. This was the business model but hardly the experience model. Their 1910s Parisian grand magasin, the Lafayette Galleries, optimized a tightly built-in promenade. What it recreated of sumptuous habitation was theatricality. Tokens of the imagined: merchandised in context.

Walt Disney also pulled this off, brilliantly translating 2D cinema into the 3D volumes of civic architecture. Like Frank Lloyd-Wright, he grasped the four-dimensional reality of both experiences. The L3 Framework may be used to question why Disney remains so different from its apparent copycats: Universal Studios, Bush Gardens, Everland and others.

Perfunctory as the worst shopping mall experiences of the USA, China, North Korea or Singapore, these more ( and less ) pedestrian theme parks have connective tissue, not articulated skeletons, of themed marketing, packaged in adequate to atrocious way-finding. They bring in the crowds; efficiently separate them from their time and cash. Do they create lasting identities? Promotionally loud but culturally ephemeral, does brand capital accumulate? Is intellectual property or resident expertise evident? Are they interchangeable commodities to visitors? Disney and Universal Studios have ownership of movie franchises in common, thus far to very different results. Due to important differences in goals or originating visions?

Bush Gardens and its ilk are co-locations, not quite collections, of rides and exhibits; carnivals’ historical descendants. Disney’s innovations revolutionized traditional forms. It still operates around functionally evolving architectural programs, based on concepts of community. “Disneyland” is an actual place, geographically and in our individual and collective imaginations. Disney’s slogan, if preposterous, is at least telling: ?The happiest place on Earth.?

These are not moral judgements! I don’t mean Disney is good and Everland is evil. I’m simply looking for intimations of business plans, operational models, corporate cultures, design frameworks, foundation stories, internal ethos —or lacks thereof— underpinning behavior. Present or absent, they affect practice, visitors and bottom lines. Determine the kind of promenading experience they can or choose to offer.

( The L3 Framework also suggests why exterior Neoclassical programs achieved, on grander scales, what Modernist architecture still so badly fumbles. But more on that another time. )

So the Aboriginal Australians’ ?dreamtime? could be the sublimated memory of a state of apotheosic keenness, induced by and adduced to their original promenade. Do the implications make you shudder? Don’t despair too quickly. We have not transmogrified heroic hunter-gatherers into prosaic shoppers. Both are myths created by liberal and conservative priesthoods.

Archaeologists call the products of a civilization or band of people its “material culture.” ( In that phrase “material” has nothing to do with “materialist.” ) In our species’ short history we’ve originated rich and poor material cultures. The words “rich” and “poor” here being value judgments on productivity, creativity and invention, not measures of so-called material wealth. We are now called a “consumer society” because we ‘consume’ a material culture we do not ‘produce’ ourselves. But it’s easy to mistake manufacture with production and capacity with skill or genius. Or origin. Rarely are good or great ideas evenly distributed in a population.

The best are peaks in a distribution of efforts. When we were all supposedly weaving our own cloth there was no correlated explosion of creativity, quality or invention. ( Nor choice, well-being or justice. ) We had little time to do anything but merely adequate, often incompetent jobs of most of our too-many chores. Specialists are the ones who can become masters of a craft; push it forward and upward. Occasionally leaping to completely different outcomes.

The modern minimum-wage single mother who shops for her family’s shelter, food and education in a Western Democracy could be in as dire a survival situation as if she were back in the Dreamtime. ( Opinions differ. ) Only the composition and appearance of her environment and its predator-prey mechanics have changed. If she is lucky to have legal rights and membership in a rule-of-law civic society the truth is those are additional resources still to be secured mainly through her own effort and struggle. Long-term stress makes her highly amenable to forms of release, from culture to drugs to shopping. Good design is ethically neutral, we can use it to help our client enrich her daily landscape and its contents or more efficiently exploit her.

I stray into politics only to explain the powerful attraction of functional promenading environments. We cannot blame our average selves for wanting to spend too much time there. They push old buttons in our psyche possibly created by mostly-dangerous circumstances now apparently transformed into mostly-benign opportunities. What used to be obligatory seems voluntary.

TAKE-AWAY ONE

What could be a design morale for this tale?

?Good promenading environments prime us for consideration and engagement.?

MODE TWO: Considering

Considering is both connection and lubricant between Promenading and Engaging. It is a branching pause where and when people make decisions about which way to continue a promenade or whether to focus —engage with— on some specific activity, thing or person. Suddenly you come to a place or see, hear, feel or smell something or someone that shifts your attention from a broad, searching stance to a narrowing, questioning one:

“ Will you wander through the Permanent Collection today? ( We more easily consider named or nameable elements of the environment. Design should be explicit, distinct. ) Will you stop at this painting by… Matisse? Will you look from where you are or approach and look closely? Will you have the patience to wait for other visitors to move away from the painting? Will you lean in to look for and read the caption? Will you take a photo of the painting and are you allowed to do so? Will you bother to ask a museum guard because you do not see any signs regarding that? Or take your shot before being told you cannot? Is your friend still with you or has she lingered in the previous gallery, or moved ahead of you? Is she still promenading, considering, engaging? Are you? Will you politely match her mode or push her to match yours? ”

While you promenade you monitor the environment passively, instinctively. When you consider you switch to a more aware dialog with that environment. You talk to yourself or your companions, to animals, inanimate objects, the gods. Shall I, shall we, engage? Considering is a transition state. It should be easy and brief but strong and memorable. Joshua Philippe, a senior visual designer in our San Francisco studio, refers to the laconic and expansive aspects of design and content. “Provide easily remembered hooks but also opportunities for people or the environment itself to be expansive,” he would explain, and I paraphrase. Promenading is nearly catatonic; considering is better supported by the laconic; both leading to one or a series of self-selected and self-selecting laconic-expansive engagements.

In museum or large retail environments this is when and where programming —in the architectural sense— is key.

TAKE-AWAY TWO

And what is the design morale at this point in our journey?

?Good considering environments are subtle but explicit expressions of what a place, time, venue, event, organization or business has to offer; including stable and changeable aspects.?

MODE THREE: Engaging

Engaging starts when you answer or try to answer any of the above chain of questions. And proceed to do so; that “so” being a blank ( __________ ? ) created by circumstance that we experience originators, designers and performers —investors, architects, industrial, graphic or sound designers, merchandisers, curators, buyers, librarians, salespeople, clerks, guards, docents, attendants et al— must provide a ready and great set of options for. If we do our job well you are able and happy to answer —including with a “no” and continuing your promenade. If your engagement is with “trying to answer” instead of with the “activity, thing or person,” we’ve failed. We have created an indifferent, vague, frustrating or terminal experience.

In museum environments now is where the curator is essential. In retail it’s the merchandiser and buyer. Many consider these roles far down the totem pole. The best and most successful retailers know they’re pivotal. Between promenading and considering planning is the active role. But now you need traction with your audience: it is authors that make the difference.

Authors? I mean original creators. (Not only designers.) For example... the retailer ZARA has established a sought-after kaleidoscopic clothing assortment, apparently through a risky but original business strategy I will call curatorial buying. We may not say there’s a ZARA style of clothing but there is certainly a ZARA style of serendipity. And it looks-and-feels like there is. ZARA may not resemble our snobbish conception of a designed environment but I suspect it’s meticulously devised. I enthusiastically nominate it as a designed experience.

I could easily write a long list of ZARA design sins but it would be presumptuous. Because ZARA feels highly authored. ( You may disagree: let me know how. ) If you are forced into the unhappy circumstance of having to choose between designed and authored: choose authored every time. Without an author apparent —a human or convincingly human-like, voiced point of view— there is little point to designing anything. While other large clothing retailers still beckon in radio station formats, ZARA’s engaging mode —directly affecting its considering mode and therefore merchandising and store design— is for the playlist generation. The available numbers tell us ZARA’s customers gladly visit and gladly buy, take home, wear and socialize the unpredictable fruits of their satisfying browse-and-gather experience.

Note the multiple authors involved. Authors of the products people buy and wear: fashion designers. Authors of the selection displayed: buyers and merchandisers. Authors of the shopping environment: designers or others who perform that role. ( Design is a ubiquitous activity but designers, we are a minority of specialists. )

Fourth and most important: the authors-curators of the final state. The people who wear ZARA purchases to say something about themselves, their statement lazy, practical, measured or exhibitionist. It’s more complex than a simple seller–buyer exchange: Shopping is.

And who orchestrates successful relationships among these four groups?

TAKE-AWAY THREE

Our third design morale?

?Good engaging environments support a rich, purposeful and actionable conversation among nameable if anonymous —often unnamed but easily felt— authors.?

Putting it all together: Promenading to Consider and Engage

San Francisco’s MoMA is a great promenading example. Mario Botta’s original layout of terraced and atrium-connected floors offered ample and configurable canyon-like circuits that have been used to diverse and successful effect since opening in 1995. We will soon see in person what crowds make of Sn?hetta’s new spaces.

[ The news are good! Update to follow. ]

Oddly, MoMA in New York, in spite of its fabulous collection, curation, vast square-footage and many expansions over a storied history, has never created a significant promenading environment. I love New York MoMA but my first task there is considering, often done beforehand. Nothing wrong with that. But my memories are of shows or works there, not of a MoMA experience in itself. NY MoMA is a serious, working space.

In much less space —Frank Lloyd-Wright’s particular genius was channeling dimensional time within three-dimensional space— New York’s Guggenheim is actually built around a distinctive, instantly iconic promenade. Serious unabashed fun. Nearby, you can leisurely walk there, the Frick efficiently compresses promenading and engaging on several circuits of coyly circumspect spaces connected by paper-thin considering layers —what stately mansions occasionally do well. The Frick Collection is driven by content happily matched to the right scale, number and style of connected containers. ( Thus recent panic over dizzying expansion plans. ) Controversial for different reasons, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia is practically a museum of promenade-consider-engage types. ( Brilliantly solving a problem the Frick does not seem aware of. ) You should visit.

Most architectural environments simply lack the space to create formal promenades. ( Originally outdoor experiences. ) Creating, preserving and evolving them costs money. Governments, institutions, communities and business must remain aware, willing, able. Ample space and resources may exist but be misused —or create a perception of missed opportunities. Recall San Francisco’s stalled debate over our then new Public Library in the 1990s.

But even small spaces, consider typical retail real estate now, can benefit from promenading. It’s what great shopping districts provide. Their particular collection of prospects-and-shelters, fa?ades, shop-windows-and-entrances, sidewalks, stairs, vestibules, kiosks, parks, parklets and other transition spaces contributing consider opportunities. Areas of Chicago, Manhattan, Paris, Barcelona, Milan, Tokyo, &c. achieve this in different scales —by design or circumstance.

Modern street grids, with drivers and pedestrians as antagonists, rarely produce good promenading experiences. Shopping malls supposedly do away with car traffic to gain the advantages of pedestrian environments but are tellingly worse. Their promenade exists as an obligatory circuit, a causeway, really, often vacant. ( Blame poor or absent content. Content can make up for a lot of architectural and design deficiencies. Content is almost synonym for authorship. ) Sadly, malls are the sole promenading opportunity for many communities.

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As designers we re-interpret —sometimes create— people’s needs and wants. But also their short and long-term motivations. True whether we design small retail spaces, large museum complexes, or their exhibit and merchandising systems. Even the objects we carry around in our person, such as mobile phones and the apps that change their behaviors and identities as gadgets; because they move with us in space and time. But why should we map attention modes to conversation states?

TAKE-AWAY FOUR

?Because through conversation we may elicit and support intentions.?

TECHNOLOGIES, METHODS and TRICKS of the TRADE

Instead of Art you may be considering Brands or engaging with Products at Bloomingdales. Location awareness technologies like Apple’s iBeacon can enrich our data set about your position and context.

Let’s define the three conversation states: ?within,? ?here? and ?this.?

People talk about different things while in each attention mode. When promenading, their inner or outer dialog is about being within a large, nameable area, defined by terrain and noticeable boundaries. Valley, forest, grove, mountain pass, city, neighborhood, district, mall, big-box store; large, institutional buildings defined by architecture plus entry and exit points, &c. These spaces contain —their content is first literally spatial— a number of zones we may want to enter, ignore or pointedly keep out of. We’re in a conversational state about being within. “Where are we?” We are looking for labeled handles. Place-name identity. Brand messages are most effective here.

As you make your promenading passage or circuit, considering whether to approach-to-enter a zone, the conversation with yourself or others switches to commitment. A conversational state about being here, as The Clash sang: “should I stay or should I go?”

Finally, if you’re comfortable or enthusiastic about being here it’s because of who or what you’re engaging with. Examine an object; complete an activity; be with someone. Whether with yourself ( reflexive ) or others ( expressive, ) you’re in a conversational state about ?this or that? person, thing or bit of information.

WHAT WE WANT

We want location awareness technology to support those conversations between (a) you, (b) things, (c) activities, (d) information and (e) people. How? iBeacon allows an iOS device to “alert apps when you approach or leave a location with an iBeacon.” Understanding this ?hello & good-bye? aspect is crucial. We need correct, timely responses to ?enter & exit? events.

Our first iBeacon tests quickly reminded us: we need a grid to set boundaries in experience space. And it’s not yet automatically supported.

Let's get a bit technical...?

Walls, floors, ceilings, doorways, windows and objects easily define usable architectural space. ( If it seems obvious: why is it so often done so poorly? ) In support of these self-evident markers, older location tech, while less flexible, is still more exact. Infrared triggers and motion-detectors give reliable, boolean responses. More complex vision systems work better but are expensive and fussy. Newer, simpler pseudo-digital technology is actually analog —and vaguer. Based on radio, it offers flexibility but currently lacks accuracy and consistency. Beacons placed inside a room, against a wall, lack directionality to discriminate: “which side of which wall?” “inside or outside?”

But iBeacon offers advantages over more mature technologies. Mainly the counterpart of beacons. It’s confusing—where does iBeacon functionality actually reside? The true nodes are not the transmitters but the iBeacon-aware apps.

I call beacons “Grid Points” and device-app combos “Floating Nodes.” Each has 2 basic states: In Range and Out of Range. A “Session” actually starts with OOR, proceeds to IR and should end with OOR.

There are also 3 “Apple” states: Far, > 10 meters; Near, a couple of meters; and Immediate, within a few centimeters, that I map to the the L3 Framework’s ?within,? ?here? and ?this.? Being radio-based, ranges are spheroids due to drift. Signal drift produces variable 3D range; exacerbated but not fully contained by physical barriers; which side of walls but also “this floor, the 1st below or 3rd above?” And for each state, it’s possible to miss IR or OOR transitions.

Sessions, initial OOR, IR, Within, Here, This, Grid Points, Floating Nodes, Position, Direction, History, final OOR and others; these elements are not ( yet ) built-in into iBeacon so we laboriously map them out. And create an n-dimensional matrix of recognized objects and events to track over space and time. A smart schema and a responsive database are must haves to map our users’ attention modes to their possible conversation states and react with passable responsiveness. Given an architectural space and its program, this is how we detect your position and context to enhance your dialog about and with the space and what it contains.

INTELLIGENCE and DELIGHT

Delight is directly connected to surprise. Good surprises may be repeated but not repetitive. If we welcome you every single time you walk past the Vince section of Bloomingdales on the same visit it becomes annoying. ( It’s why so many downloaded, then turned-off, location-aware apps from Starbucks, Walgreens and others after the initial blog-hype proved as shallow as usual. ) It revealed the dumbness of the system and its ballyhooers.

Location awareness is a kind of user experience Turing Test. But instead of seeking artificial intelligence, we want to express actual human intentionality.

Intelligent architectural design expresses a mind and the heart of an author. “There is, ( there should be, ) an architect,” Lucinda Tay told me on a flight from Shanghai. We discussed the variety of authors involved: curators, buyers, merchandisers &c. And designers. Intelligent experience design —assisted by still-primitive but rapidly evolving location awareness technology— functionally expresses the “...intelligence and feeling...” of those who create and sustain the environment. “...visitors most definitely included.”

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We are working on projects to test our capacity as designers to bend the technology to the benefit of our client and you: the ultimate end user. We want to change the record by example.

Because it’s disappointing: that so much omnichannel talk still results in serial, single, pointy jabs in the eye. Shallow, na?ve application of technology promotes tunnel vision. Why spread beacons over a wide space to produce narrow, quickly annoying, staccato effects?

Your phone should not funnel all experiences. You should not wield it like a reverse flashlight, which instead of illuminating the space around you, opening up your experience, channels all messages from and all your actions on that environment through its narrow viewport. A competing one to your natural point of focus, decision-making and peripheral attention. ( A good, terse, reverse-order definition of the Location-cubed Framework. ) Unsafe, impolite and impoverished behaviors ensue. Conversation is prevented, not augmented. It’s why people often ask: “pay attention to me, not your phone.”

It’s convenient for designers and implementers. We’ve convinced everybody to wirelessly wiretap themselves. But convenience is rarely the mother of invention. How can we focus on what’s opportune, useful and a delight to the visitor, user, shopper, worker or resident in the designed environment?

At Eight Inc. we are trying to use location awareness to drive not a stream of inconvenient notifications solely thru your phone —mono-channel— but a considered set of cues in the environment around you: multi-channel. ( I’m recently convinced we turned multi-channel into omni-channel by dumb linear extrapolation. I admit it: omni seemed a better, newer multi. But to me now, omni suggests unconsidered excess. Instead, design is discrimination; selection; choice. ) Good design is a subtle layering of modulated effects, not a layer-cake of insistence.

Carelessly, even multi-channel will quickly give you an omni-channel headache. To enhance the architectural program, make your experience pleasant, punctuated by delight, we must respect the dynamics of your promenade, consideration and engagement.

The digital marketing industry is, however, currently predicated on using every available channel to disturb your privacy and —in the USofA constitutionally protected— domestic tranquility. ( Which ‘domestic’ courts have declared to include your person, which should be free of unwarranted searches, man-handling or provocations. Notificationists are given notice! )

When connected, ( previously called online, ) every attempt is made to detect, identify and track you. For the crassly unimaginative purpose of displaying advertising on-demand. ( Their demand, not yours. ) Visit a geographical place, an internet site, touch a link in either, install an app. You soon realize you’re being followed. It’s nearly obscene and I suggest ‘flashing’ is an apt label. It’s an ugly business practice. The sole offering of many well-funded startups.

??? Flashing trans. (also refl.). digital slang. verb. Unsolicited, inconvenient, often unpreventable exposure of marketing messages to unwilling and usually captive audiences or individuals. 1893—J.S. Farmer & W.E. Henley Slang III. 11/2  To flash it,..to expose the person. ???

How to prevent pernicious on-line behaviors from following us right out onto the streets and interior spaces, public and private, of our daily lives? At Eight Inc, when designing public spaces, instead of bombarding visitors with notifications, alerts or flashes, we want to support a voluntary, enthusiastic conversation between them, the environment and the people, objects and activities there.

So what is our alternative?

TAKE-AWAY FIVE

—A—

?Use location awareness technology to make the communications and merchandising program —of products, information and ideas— more dynamic around the visitor.?

—B—

?Include human and humane behavior in your program; do not use the technology like the machine-gun version of direct mail.?

—C—

?Respect, preserve and augment the privacy and the conversations of your visitors.?

EXIT and GOOD-BYE

Location, location, location suggests one aspect can trump all others. ( Is that true? ) It’s a laconic phrase that creates room and opportunity for expansiveness. It can be unfolded as “In real estate the where is more important than everything else.” Or at least triply so. But while the unfolded version is clear it is also bland. Uncooked. Not distinctive. Nor memorable. Perhaps built for clarity but not designed for effect. On the other hand ? location, location, location ? is telegraphic and photogenic. What William Safire and his crowd-sources tracked down for us in 2009 is a laconic–expansive pearl. Read it again; it has all the information needed. A classic of its genre. A good classified ad is the ultimate elevator pitch. To use a current idiom; it’s a veritable tweet:

Using only 87 characters it identifies its target audience with 3 words, makes a direct appeal with just 1, lobs timeless originality and humor at it by repeating the same word 3 times, and explains how the thing offered relates to other things which determine its value with only 4. It creates an appetite for further discussion. A reason to talk. A means to a conversation about opportunities.

And it gives us what every promenading, considering and engaging environment should also always provide: a memorable exit.

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This article was published in modified form in Eight Inc.’s website as: Location, location, location. ( https://eightinc.com/insights/location-location-location )

— by Hector Moll-Carrillo / copyright ? 2016, 2019

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NOTES

[note 1] Xxxxxx.