Prohibitions and negations as a vehicle for learning.
Supermarket trolley. Seen in Madrid.
Chased by brands
You’ve surely noticed that when browsing the web some ads are closely related to your previous visits to certain pages. Even if that happened days ago. Online behavior tracking have been there for some time, and boost sales enormously for an online retail business -just to mention one-.
How do you feel about that?. It’s obvious that it have some minority report alike effect, orwellian if you prefer. Does it discomfort you?. Recently I realized that it works for me as a reminder. As a pending to-do alert I have to fulfill. Weird. But in some way it push me away from completing my purchase through clicking the banner. It’s just like when you have too much attention on you from the staff in a brick and mortar store.
I would consider seriously the negative outcomes of feeling chased and the impact on brands over the sales.
Mixed feelings
Not drinkable water sign upon a standing water cooler.
Double cheking
This is a lift calling deck, with nonsense duplicated buttons. Remember me the double checking problem some people experiment.
Seen in Glory Mall, Beijing
Pattern recognition in branding
Is Gucci selling rubber carpets?. Read carefully, it says Gucgi. But that doesn’t matter very much to your brain, at least at first glance.
Seen on a Taxi on Tianjin, China.
Designed chaos in architecture
It’s taken for granted that order makes our life easier. And it’s also better known that shopping malls are created so that you have to walk a little bit to come across shops while you seek for the next escalators.
What really surprised me was to know that some malls are designed to get us completely lost. They talk about it in The secret life of buildings, a great series that face how building’s shape affect us. Since watching it, I’ve been quite obsessed analyzing path routes in every shopping mall I visit. It turns up to be kind of fun to discover every trick that architects have planned to makes us walk along the building:
- Escalators that drives you not just one floor, but accidentally two or even more without almost noticing it.
- Lifts that works only for some floors.
- Levels that are only accessed by some lifts and escalators.
- Different placement of lifts and escalator, it’s a seek and find game to spot the right one that takes you where you want.
- Solitary escalators to which you have to walk, just to check if it’s going up or down.
- The list continues up to the infinite…
The series can be found here:
http://www.megavideo.com/?d=XWZHIMJO
http://www.megavideo.com/?d=GHIWY73L
http://www.megavideo.com/?d=ZWP5AZOP
Thanks to Dámaris for telling about this!
Expectation gap
Expectation gap between what you think you will find in a drugstore and what you actually run into.
Selection process in the absence of hierarchy
Just try to pick one.
Seen on a tech market in Hong Kong.
McDonalds, captando la atención a través del sonido
La intrusión mental que produce cuando pasas por delante del comercio es tremenda. Es imposible que McDonalds no te venga a la cabeza. ¿Es esto ético?.
Salvando las distancias me recordaba a otro caso que ví en Marrakesh, si no recuerdo mal, donde en una calle estrecha los comercios enfrentados unos junto a otros competían por poner música tecno a todo volumen, orientando los altavoces hacia el centro de la calle.
Visto en Beijing, en el centro comercial New World.
Add ons
¿Qué circunstancias deben darse para que dos elementos unidos cumpliendo cierta función sean percibidos como un único objeto?, ¿o como un objeto mejorado?. Es evidente que el árbol (que es un ser vivo, no un objeto) dificilmente cuadra con el aditamento eléctrico. Pero ¿y si en vez de por un árbol la caja estuviese sujeta por una gran estaca?. ¿Hablaríamos de estaca y cuadro eléctrico o sólo del cuadro eléctrico?. Me imagino que más bien de lo segundo.
Visto en Vila Real de San Antonio, Portugal.