Project by: Pietro Desiato, Festim Zuta and Daniel KarlssonThis concept has been developed on the theme of fluency that means “the degree in which your able to move between media streams” (J. Lowgren). We’ve focused on the shopping activity because it is a very complex experience that involves a lot of media streams, first of all the city.
In this project we’ve tried to be fluent and not only useful. That means that we’ve thought about interactions that do not invade the personal experience of shopping but just work in the background. They offer the person an “experience add-on”. The interesting thing is that the person has the power to choose if she wants to give attention to the system or not. We think that the fluency of this system, that we’ve called in a very marketable way iShop, is in its discretion: it works silently and do not affect the your everyday life, until you want.
Our target are young shoppoholic people that would like to have a sort of agent that takes care about their interests, their favourite items and so on. We thought also about the different phases the shopping has since, especially for our target, it’s not only about going to the shop and buy the cloth you need. For this kind of people, shopping is an experience that start at home or at a coffee bar, where they can plan the purchases. And it can go on while they’re browsing the stores, looking for something that could match their preferences. There is also an important social aspect in the shopping: it is the sharing of preferences, wishes, latest purchases; it is about organising the next purchase with your friends or showing them your last t-shirt.There are a lot of studies about shopping and we don’t want to go further.Here there is a short scenario that shows how the system should work. Anyway, a short explanation is due.iShop is a software for your cell phone that works through Bluetooth and RFID. It is based on a profile that evolves during use. This profile is about your preferences (favouties marks, size, color etc). When you want to go shopping you just tak your phone with you. As you enter the stores and start browsing clothes, it searches in your preferences and as it finds a match it sends a signal to the hanger which starts to glows (you can set your own color). In this way you can immediately see what clothes could be interesting to you.
iShop – A fluent shopping experience
It would be a nice ambient effect to see all the store glows, but since we want fluency and not confusion, we want to underline that RFID is a very short range technology and that the glowing hangers would be only the ones close to you.
2 Responses to “iShop, a fluent shopping experience”
This would be a great way to find those sale items that are hidden between the pricey ones – being the thrifty shopper that I am, I know that feature would be high marks in my book. Any thoughts on incorporating this into online stores?
Definitely useful in that way. Online stores are quite different and you have a search function for that but it could be good to think about new ways of searching items online. The peculiarity of this device is fluency: you don’t have to give attention to it all the time. On screen based application, like a website, is slightly different because all your attention is on the screen