Category Archives: Jennifer on Design

Jennifer Busch

Three Trends in Retail Design

By Jennifer Busch
November 28, 2011

The national unemployment rate continues to hover around 9%, the stock market is performing erratically, and household incomes are stagnant. So there may be few logical explanations for why we have seen 14 consecutive months of growth in the retail sector, and the National Retail Federation expects holiday retail sales to increase by 2.8% in 2011, slightly surpassing the 10-year national average of 2.6%. Even though household incomes are not growing, consumers have significantly lowered their debt levels, possibly making it easier for them to spend—cautiously. Also, many retailers have learned to deal with consumer uncertainty as part of the “new normal,” and are getting on with their business plans with these realities in mind. And there is always the argument that there was nowhere to go but up. So while the retail sector is by no means booming, levels of activity and opportunity are picking up enough to resonate with the A&D community. The competition for discretionary dollars is fierce, but design can be a real competitive advantage. More than ever before, bricks and mortar retail concepts are all about the customer experience.

Small is Big

“There is a huge trend in small-scale retail,” says Mark Janson, a partner in the New York City-based design firm Janson Goldstein, whose clients are particularly interested in expansion into European cities and trendy North American cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. This is happening in much more low key ways than in boom years gone by, however, as today, designers must be very sophisticated with limited design budgets. Labeling current retail concepts “edgier, more sculptural, artistic, and having attitude,” Janson cites a trend toward found spaces or pop-up spaces that are, nevertheless, “designed to look like nothing was done.”

Charles Sparks, CEO, President, and Creative Director for Charles Sparks + Company in Westchester, Ill., is also finding that smaller is bigger in retail today. “The business model of doing more with less continues to translate to smaller, more focused assortments in smaller, more efficient store formats, targeting more narrow audiences,” he says. Pressure to reduce capital expenditures and occupancy costs, and to increase the leveraging of existing real estate assets has led, he says, to “designers having to do more with less in their designs, materials, and scope of work.”

The more intimate brand experience offered by retailers in local markets is also being translated into a strategy for department stores. “In large-scale retail,” says Janson, “image brands are designing their own space within a space.” Effectively, department stores are becoming big boxes that hold lots of little stores, as brands compete to create their own alluring environments within.

For Janson Goldstein, which does work for Toronto-based department store chain Holt Renfrew, this boutique trend has changed the way department stores are designed. “Our job is to create an environment that reflects a larger brand,” continues Janson. “We set aside the space, and the individual brands bring in their own design teams.” In this case, the path that the customer takes through the store becomes the most important element of the overall store design. “The way customers see the space unfolding and the interconnection of areas and levels are key to the experience,” he says.

Local Relevance

The long trend of cookie-cutter design is coming to an end as retailers come to understand that consumers want a more authentic shopping experience that speaks to place. According to Sparks, “As a reflection of a more cynical and cautious consumer, smart retailers increasingly try to minimize the impression of overt commercialism, homogenized prototypes, and pretense.” This translates into store designs that use indigenous materials and palettes, and introduce references to local neighborhoods, architecture, and cultural influences. “It is the antithesis of designs being rolled out across the country,” agrees Janson. For many brands, gone are the days of having no visual clues whether you are shopping in Atlanta or Orange County.

Sparks cites two iconic brands as examples of once-standardized retailers that are changing their store concepts to capture a more local design flavor—no pun intended. “Starbucks, as an important part of their strategy to ‘re-ignite’ their offering, stipulates that each store shall include strong references to the locality it serves,” he says. “Even McDonalds has been discarding references to cookie-cutter roll-outs in their buildings and environments while pursuing a much wider variety of approaches to their buildings and interiors.”

Technology

Video did not kill the radio star, nor has online commerce killed off our intense interest in going shopping. But the relationship between technology and bricks and mortar continues to evolve. In the past, screens, kiosks, and interaction points inside of physical retail space were deemed progressive. Today they are no longer effective enough to engage a very wired and tech-savvy consumer base. “It’s not about the technology, it’s about the experience,” says Sparks. “Smart retailers are dematerializing the technology so it is more seamless and unnoticeable. The customer’s mobile device is becoming the service avatar. Shoppers’ established social networks and existing digital world are being integrated into retail stores.”

In a July 2010 article for VM+SD online, Brian Fleener, Vice President of Retail Store Development for MulvannyG2 Architecture in Bellevue, Wash., wrote how the better integration of virtual and physical in retail is particularly important to capturing the attention of the much-discussed Generation Y. “GenY expects social media, as well as community building, to be integrated into the retail experience,” wrote Fleener. “Retailers who take the lead in using it to drive shoppers to stores now will appeal to greater numbers of GenY as this age group progresses into its peak spending years.” Fleener advocates the convergence of social media and face to face—connecting online and the in-store environment–to build consumer loyalty. “This sense of belonging is crucial to attracting GenY,” he says. “Make it happen by connecting online and store environments with design techniques and events.”

Overall, retail is abandoning pretense in favor of accessibility and a more authentic approach to customers, making way for scenarios like Forever 21, the young women’s discount clothing retailer, launching a flagship store at 5th Avenue and 54th Street in Manhattan, within steps of Bottega Veneta, Pucci, and De Beers. “We are seeing more untraditional and diverse approaches to design, locations, and offerings being cross-pollinated between various formats of retail,” observes Sparks. Says Janson, “There is a co-mingling of high and low that people previously have not been comfortable with. It’s actually very interesting.”

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Jennifer Busch

Jennifer on Design: Senior Living Trends

By Jennifer Busch
October 21, 2011

Byron Kuth, a principal of Kuth Ranieri (www.kuthranieri.com) in San Francisco, calls it a “demographic tsunami,” and questions whether anyone is ready to meet the demand that is coming—and coming fast.  He is talking about the retirement of the Baby Boomer generation (born 1946 to 1964) that is just now beginning. “We are currently looking at 40 million people over the age of 65, and within 20 years that number will double,” says Kuth. “Is anyone prepared for these proportions?”

Kuth Ranieri and two other firms with expertise in senior living—SmithGroup (www.smithgroup.com) and Perkins Eastman (www.perkinseastman.com)—are among those trying to address the challenge, but admittedly the senior living segment is a slow-moving beast. Currently hampered by the nation’s economic woes, the industry has suffered reduced occupancies, bankruptcies, and a credit squeeze that has stifled new development. And that’s just the business part. Massive cultural shifts are also afoot. “This generation re-scripted how we were raised and educated, what we did abroad, and everything about technology,” says Kuth. “Now it will radically re-script this later stage of living and working.” On the positive side, with numbers like the ones Kuth is quoting, growing demand in the senior living market has no choice but to ignite opportunity for developers, operators, and designers in the coming decade and beyond.

Undoubtedly, our traditional view of senior living—warehousing aging individuals away to play chess and watch television in massive institutional buildings that were plunked down in the middle of cornfields—has given way to an active, enriching, more assimilated version of retirement that is spawning new models for senior living. Consumers of these services are more sophisticated and are living longer, healthier lives, making the goal of the industry to provide options for occupancy by choice as opposed to occupancy by need, according to David Segmiller, a principal in the Charlotte, N.C., office of Perkins Eastman.

Katy Darling, an associate also at Perkins Eastman Charlotte, explains that there is a great demand for amenities and choice–including gyms, movie theaters, grocery stores and other forms of retail, variety in dining options—in contemporary senior living settings, and these provide fertile ground for marketers attempting to attract new customers with a focus on lifestyle, rather than end of life. “This population wants much more diversity, and this will be driven exponentially as the Baby Boomers come along,” Darling says. Segmiller describes “amenities on steroids.” For example, in today’s senior living facilities the traditional beauty/barber shop has become a day spa. “This population is crying out for more sophisticated options that are more about typical daily life,” he says.

The demand for diversity and activity translates into senior living communities that bear much greater resemblance to mixed-use developments than they do to their traditional, institutional precursors. It all adds up to a more holistic way of life for seniors. “Older CCRCs (continuing care retirement communities) had community rooms and exercise rooms as little gestures,” says Joyce Polhamus, vice president and director of SmithGroup’s senior living practice. “Now they are not just amenities for socialization, but are more about purposeful and healthy living.” They also speak to assimilation into the broader community, as entire senior living campuses are being integrated into existing suburban and urban communities with which they share amenities and services.

Other emerging models include the Green House® senior living concept, which emphasizes community-based, family-like “homes” for people who like to live with companionship. “This model serves people in a dignified way, and counteracts loneliness, boredom, and isolation,” explains Polhamus. Residents of a Green House partake in all the typical activities of a family—including cooking, cleaning, and decision-making—and staff are expected to pitch in with many day-to-day activities in addition to elder care. Though the most typical location for a Green House is a suburban neighborhood, urban, high-rise models are beginning to make an appearance.

One interesting model that Kuth currently is studying, UBRCs (university-based retirement communities) integrates senior living communities with academic campuses, recognizing that these populations share a need for similar amenities within the confines of manageable distances. The idea is that members of each community can contribute to the other in meaningful ways, with the added benefits of inter-generational knowledge and culture swaps.

Stepped care—the ability to age in place—continues to be an important trend, even if the definitions are changing. “Assisted living used to be so close to the skilled nursing units that no one wanted to go there,” says Segmiller. “Now we move AL to the other side of the campus and give the residents access to the same amenities as the independent living people.” This helps eliminate the stigma of moving to assisted living. “There used to be the perception that moving through that one door meant moving to the end of life,” he adds. Memory care, or care of patients with dementia, is also taking on a much less confining and much more active nature, with appropriate activities like wander gardens and other pockets of interest figuring significantly in the architecture and planning of the structures and grounds. According to Polhamus, memory care will be the biggest growth area in senior living for the next 15 years.

Skilled nursing facilities do reflect a more hospital-like environment because of the necessary level of medical care, but across all these facility types the style trends are moving away from the traditional and toward the contemporary. “The style is very transitional now,” says Segmiller. “We are doing work that 10 years ago would have been considered way too modern. Today it is considered accessible.”

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Jennifer Busch

Three Trends in Office Design

By Jennifer Busch
August 15, 2011

It’s hard to define precisely what the “office of the future” will look like, but top corporate designers from around the country agree that it will look nothing like our traditional (and quickly fading) concept of the corporate workplace. Branding—expressing organizational personality, culture, and mission through design—takes center stage as we move forward, so the visual cues, colors, materials, and textures that work for one kind of company—say, an internet startup—might be totally inappropriate for a more established Fortune 500. But variety will be a constant in all of them, from the types of functional spaces found within the workplace to the multi-ethnic, multigenerational workforces that populate them—or not, as mobile working becomes as much the norm in the 21st century as cubicles were in the 20th.

AOL in Palo Alto, designed by Studio O+A. Photography by Jasper Sanidad.

“We try desperately not to use the word ‘corporate’ says Thomas Krizmanic, a principal in the New York office of Studios Architecture. “It’s bad word #1 in our office. It evokes a ready image in our clients’ minds of standards, homogenization, past ways of doing things—all concepts that our clients don’t want to be lumped in together with. A rotary dial phone is corporate. An iPhone with personalized apps is the future space model of the office—flexible, user-defined, programmable, mobile, connect-ready, multifunctional, and cool.”

Mobility

“We are having a dialogue about mobility programs with a cross-section of clients,” says Nila Leiserowitz, a Managing Principal in the Chicago office of Gensler. “It is a viable way of accommodating real estate challenges, new workstyles, work/life balance,” made possible by virtual tools. Nevertheless, designers and their clients are still evaluating what this means with respect to space, human resources, and project delivery

In the Los Angeles office of HOK, Senior Vice President Pamela Light says that there is a real push among clients to support remote work, to improve work/life balance for employees and reduce real estate costs. Not surprisingly, “The biggest reason is budget,” she notes. “Twenty percent of projects in the last 18 months have asked us for a 20 percent reduction in square footage.” In these scenarios, most of the space savings, she says, are realized through the drop in dedicated workspace.

Early on in the mobility movement—back in the mid-1990s days of the “alternative office”—real estate savings was also the most common, but actually the worst reason to encourage employees to work outside the traditional corporate environment. At that time connectivity was in still in its infancy compared to today, corporations did  not fully appreciate the impact on corporate culture and “connectedness”—not to mention the need for change management—and designers were just beginning to grasp the space implications. But with today’s mobile gadgetry and a workforce increasingly geared toward using it, remote work has become increasingly and intuitively productive—even within the confines of the physical office.

Collaboration

What does this mean? Mobility isn’t just reserved for remote workers. More and more, it is happening within the office space, and it supports new levels of collaboration, another important trend. “We design less individual space and more people spaces, with ready connect power and internet, in the open and linked to each other to make an ‘experience sequence of spaces,” says Krizmanic. “Work is less desk-focused and more collaborative. The new worker is a ‘thinker’ who feeds off of interaction with people.”

Bike-Work-ShopBike Shop at Microsoft Building #4 in Redmond, WA, designed by Studio O+A. Photography by Jasper Sanidad.

Leiserowitz agrees. “Collaboration is fundamental to innovation,” she says. “But people are trying to define it in terms of what it means for their own organization. It is happening more formally than informally, and is defined in a variety of different ways.” For example, designers can evaluate how circulation spaces relate to work areas to encourage chance encounters. Work areas adjacent to open office spaces accommodate ad hoc meetings. Conference rooms that encourage standing rather than sitting create new meeting dynamics. Increasingly sophisticated interactive technology creates opportunities to collaborate with remote colleagues. “We are taking a very fluid approach to collaboration,” notes Leiserowitz. “You have to get people comfortable in the work environment to allow these interactions to happen.”

One way to encourage more interaction is to look at the work environment more holistically. “Office space is more like the home,” says Light. “We have living rooms, family rooms; and everybody ends up in the kitchen.” Collaboration areas are reflecting these residential spaces, with lounge seating or big tables around which colleagues can gather, while private offices are like bedrooms; they are quiet, confidential spaces. “There are also fewer formal conference rooms,” she adds. “And most clients don’t want anything fancy…including simple technology that requires no special programming.”

Primo Orpilla and Verda Alexander, principals of San Francisco-based Studio o+a say, “Workplace is lifestyle. You work there but you also go there to socialize. Today’s workplace transcends traditional office use.” And because transparency and democracy are also driving office design, the wide variety of meeting areas includes tertiary spaces that are permeable and see-through. Lounge furniture may be placed in hallways creating simple, casual collaboration areas. Casual and accidental collision between staff is not only increasingly possible, but increasingly open and visible.

Variety and Customization

If variety in meeting spaces is an underlying catalyst for collaboration, it is also the spice of life in the workplace, and can be pushed even to the point of customization for some clients. “Make it different,” says Krizmanic. “Celebrate the uncorporate. Add something local and community-centered. It can be fun or silly…playfulness counts. Clever is good. Ingenious is better.”

AOL in Palo Alto, designed by Studio O+A. Photography by Jasper Sanidad.

Here of course, is where a designer’s creativity can really be put to the test. Orpilla and Alexander routinely embrace this challenge in their work, rearranging “standards” for new uses, and designing and specifying product mash-ups that are carefully documented so they can be replicated in other facilities. And creative variety is not just a strategy to be used on their Bay Area high-tech start up clients. “Some clients need to get the innovation bug back into their culture,” says Orpilla.

Can design really do that? Just ask Microsoft, now a dowager of the information technology sector, which recently hired Studio o+a to renovate a portion of one of its buildings with the goal of reinvigorating its entrepreneurial spirit. Or, as Leiserowitz puts it, “Designers have a responsibility to help create a vital and energetic work force.”

And—lest we forget—sustainability also has a major influence on corporate office design. But the good news here is, having been one of the first and most committed sectors to embrace green design and building practices, the corporate sector in many ways no longer considers sustainability a “trend”, but rather a given that is more and more just expected moving forward. Energy-efficiency in lighting will be the next great frontier in sustainability in the workplace, so look for an ongoing and growing stream of lighting products based on LED technology to enter the marketplace.

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Jennifer Busch

Jennifer On Design: Curves

By Jennifer Busch
July 6, 2011

This is the third post in my Jennifer on Design series, a monthly exploration of the trends and inspirations that are shaping the way designers approach interior spaces around the world. You can read my previous posts here.

Salone Internazionale del Mobile 2011, also known as “Milan Design Week” is one of the largest furnishings and accessories exhibitions in the world. One of the major trends I noticed last April involved curves. We found many examples of furniture pieces and installations where hard angles have given way to gentle curves—particularly where planes meet—resulting in flowing, organic shapes in seating and tables.

Below is a slideshow of some of the great examples of curves we saw at Milan this year.

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Jennifer Busch

Jennifer on Design: Asymmetry

By Jennifer Busch
June 27, 2011

This is the second post in my new Jennifer on Design series, a weekly exploration of the trends and inspirations that are shaping the approach of designers to interior spaces around the world. You can read my first post here.

Salone Internazionale del Mobile 2011, also known as “Milan Design Week” is one of the largest furnishings and accessories exhibitions in the world. One of the global design trends I saw spinning out of this year’s expo in April was a move towards asymmetry being influenced by one of the principles of biomimicry. Nature creates random forms and patterns, and the happy side effect of this move away from precision and neatness is that products can be configured and reconfigured according to the designers’ creativity or even, in some cases, the users’ needs or whims.

Below is a slideshow of some of the great examples of asymmetry we saw at Milan this year.

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