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This article was originally published in the Robin Report, Community Retail At Scale

It’s Not Just Good, It’s Good For Business

No one can argue with the benefits of scale when it comes to retail. Large-scale retailers provide deeper assortments at lower prices than their ma-and-pa competitors. But there’s a problem with all this scaling up. Mass-scale stores have become divorced from the communities where they sit. Most big-box retail stores look like they have been dropped in place by the mothership, and show little connection to where they are. All retail should have a sense of place. Now that we’re used to all those benefits of scale, customers yearn again for the relationships they had with their stores when they were owned and operated by their neighbors. Prediction: the next big wave in brick-and-mortar retail will combine the power of scale with the benefits of old-school mom-and-pop retail relationships. This is the transformation of big-box stores to come.

Whole Foods Shows the Way

This article was originally published in the Robin Report, Robin Lewis interviews Ed Schlossberg

Robin Lewis: What in the world was Best Buy thinking when they discontinued their Studio D and Escape small store concepts several years ago? You designed these neighborhood boutiques to customize these stores for specific niche demographics and lifestyles. What’s the backstory on this?

Ed Schlossberg: I had this idea in 1998 to do something called a Digital Playground. I thought if these technology companies were going to be successful, they needed to let people play using digital stuff so that they could see what would work. So I made a presentation to Brad Anderson who was CEO of Best Buy, and he said, ‘This is fantastic, we would love to do this.’ He hired us to design the first Digital Playground. It took some time to get it going. When Brad hired James Damien as their visual merchant, he was really excited about it, and we kind of became his team.
RL: What was the design strategy?

The world is awash in data — environmental sensors, cell phone data, consumer purchasing habits, social media participation, traffic flows, medical histories. And like many designers, ESI has been excited about the opportunities coming out of the emerging field of data visualization, which can help the world make sense of Big Data flowing around us and inspire large-scale change.

Over the last few years, ESI’s visionary founder, Ed Schlossberg, has been in conversation with his alma mater, Columbia University, to enhance its design leadership by advancing the field of data visualization through interdisciplinary collaboration. 

On July 2, at the prestigious Aspen Ideas Festival, Ed was on deck to help announce the launch of the Advanced Data Visualization Project (ADVP) at Columbia University. The initiative, which is sponsored by Thomson Reuters and will be based out of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), will facilitate research into data visualization and its implications for academia and industry.

Ed, an adjunct professor at Columbia University, and Mark Wigley, Dean of GSAPP, presented the vision of ADVP within a panel discussion titled ‘Information’s Beautiful Future’, moderated by James Powell, Chief Technology Officer at Thomson Reuters.

What is the future of storytelling? 

This question is being asked a lot these days.  The availability of new tools and new media strategies have brought about many experiments in storytelling.  Whether incorporating social media, gaming, augmented reality, audience participation, or transmedia narratives, various elements are being pieced together in different ways to create new experiences.  I recently attended a two talks at MOMA about the current state of Interactive Documentaries — specifically, documentaries native to the web.

Part I of “A Field Guide to the Interactive Documentary,”  was hosted by Zach Wise, the multimedia producer responsible for much of the innovative work at The New York Times. The two projects Wise showed really stood out: Johnny Cash Project, which creates an ever evolving music video from over 250,000 (and counting) user contributions, and the NYT’s “A Year at War” project, which enables visitors to navigate their own journey through a breadth of video content, articles, and original documentation to learn about the stories of the U.S. military at war in Afghanistan.