Rethinking the education of retail design. What are the competences a retail designer needs in this fast evolving discipline?

Abstract

t has been our hypothesis that designing for retail in the future would strongly benefit from more specialized education and training programs, truly integrating social sciences and design disciplines. To this end, we are currently aiming to launch a postgraduate certificate program on retail design. In preparing this program, we have critically reviewed the three different educational programs that we already organize on retail design. To have a first indication of the validity of this approach, we were able to use interviews with senior and junior designers of 10 retail design agencies. The results suggest that there seems to be both a demand and an opportunity for a retail design program for (young) professionals who will work together in group on a (preferably realistic) design assignment, which offers a sufficiently deep handling of issues, an integration of theory and practice via a workshop setup and should most likely be offered in English.

Gaining customer centric understanding of retail displays for future innovations

“…Much of the literature in marketing, retail and retail design has concerned the digitalisation and future of retail in general (Grewal et al , 2017; Hagberg et al , 2016; Verhoef et al , 2015). For retail design, recommendations for the physical store to emphasise experiential qualities were promoted (Helm et al , 2020), as were changes to the concept of “store” towards “universe” inclusive of both digital and physical spaces (Madsen and Petermans, 2020) and new curricular needs to design for retail in this digitised era have been identified (Quartier et al , 2017). Additionally, the integration of realms was discussed from a retail frontline management perspective (Mende and Noble, 2019) and a plea to disregard dualities like human versus machine and touch versus tech in research was raised (Singh et al , 2019).…”