Jan Vanrie

Since economy and marketing are shifting from a goods to a service dominant logic, creating and directing memorable customer experiences in retail store environments has become a valuable differentiation strategy. While customer experiences continually receive more ...

To study the impact of lighting on atmosphere perception, emotions and behaviour of consumers in a realistic setting, an experiment was conducted in a three-dimensional simulated supermarket in which three different lighting settings, corresponding to the settings of three different supermarkets in Belgium, were implemented. Ninety-five participants performed a realistic shopping task. The participants were observed and they were questioned regarding their emotional responses to the retail space and their perception of atmosphere afterwards. The results indicate that although significant effects on behaviour were absent, realistic lighting settings can have subtle effects on the perceived atmosphere and experienced emotions and lighting in itself can be used to communicate a certain image.

In this chapter, we argue that retail design is becoming, in daily practice, a more professional, distinct field, based on an interdisciplinary foundation and with an increasing need for specialized knowledge. Although cutting-edge retail design practice is leading the way in this respect, this approach is not yet widespread and with the evolutions that we sketch, new questions demanding innovative answers keep arising. Here, we plead for integrating the strengths of design and consumer marketing with the aim of a better understanding and practice of store design, and evolve into a transdisciplinary field that is creating a unity of intellectual frameworks beyond the disciplinary perspectives. However, this integration faces a number of obstacles. More specifically, we will discuss three “gaps” that we believe will have to be addressed if this more professionalized discipline of “retail design” is to mature. Finally, we will discuss our experiences with some educational and research initiatives in which we have started to tackle these issues.

Since economy and marketing are shifting from a goods to a service dominant logic, creating and directing memorable customer experiences in retail store environments has become a valuable differentiation strategy. While customer experiences continually receive more attention in literature, knowledge about how to induce these experiences often lacks definitions of central concepts and empirical support. Given that different authors have acknowledged an environment’s
ability to change consumer emotions and thereby affecting consumer responses, different attempts have been made to capture the mediating role of emotions on consumer responses in the retail store. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this literature by investigating the applicability
of two verbal and one visual self-report emotion measurement instrument for measuring emotions in customer experiences in retail stores.

Today’s public discourse on the design of care centers for the elderly population is increasingly emphasizing the importance of subjective well-being (SWB) and the value that architecture and interior architecture can have in this respect. This paper elaborates on a design exercise for 10 groups of 4 master students in interior architecture in which they had to rethink the design of the communal space system of an existing residential care center (RCC) with the goal of augmenting the living experience and SWB of the residents and add potential value for the neighbourhood. This design exercise was developed from the dual perspective of (i) developing spatial solutions for improving the positive experience and perceived housing quality of elderly in residential care, and (ii) designing architectural spaces based on ethnographic research performed by the student-designers themselves. The purpose of this research is to develop a design roadmap from the data of the design exercise by analyzing the sequential stages that students ran through and the design strategies that they adopted. The proposed design roadmap is a first step in developing a tool that can ultimately assist designers in creating generous and stimulating architectural environments that have a positive effect on SWB.

Subjective well-being (SWB) is an emerging research topic in the field of design sciences, whereby various design researchers focus on the key question ‘how to design for SWB’. Throughout different design disciplines, definitions for SWB are rising and design models and strategies are being developed in an effort to enable designers to increase users’ SWB. However, a clear image of how to design an (interior) architectural environment with the purpose of increasing people’s level of subjective well-being is still in its infancy. In this paper we formulate spatial design missions for (interior) architects that possibly ignite or increase users’ SWB. We start from the general PERMA happiness model of Seligman (2011), modify it to our research needs and illustrate it with material from a design exercise that was carried out by master students in interior architecture in which they had to rethink the communal space system of an existing residential care center. We conclude the paper by formulating seven design missions that, in our viewpoint, allow to augment SWB for elderly persons in residential care environments.

Conjoint interiors, the semi-public interior spaces located in e.g. large-scale dwelling projects, host different functions for a variety of users. Designers of conjoint interiors today, face the major challenge of accommodating the increasingly varied design briefs of this variety of users. In these environments, people today tend to emphasize intangible qualities, the ‘feel’ of the environment, much more than tangible ones, i.e., the ‘look’ of the environment. Consequently, instead of working with a purely spatial design brief, designers are now provoked to work with more emotional briefs, taking into account not only the objective and physical characteristics, but also more subjective requirements. Although it is clear that designers of these conjoint interiors will need to work within a more human-centred framework, the question remains of how this process can become more focused towards creating intangible qualities and specific spatial affordances.
To address this question, our contribution investigates the intangible qualities and the design approach of two cases: Dom Narkomfin, the so-called ‘social condenser’ (designed by Ginzburg in 1928), and Layer Cake, the outcome of a 2015 design exercise of a residence for older persons that approaches the conjoint interior from a renewed social perspective. These cases will be analysed via two lenses: (1) a societal perspective, researching context and target group, and (2) a more anthropological perspective, focusing on experiences and intangible design qualities. The results will be used to propose architectural-theoretical principles that attempt to reinvigorate the ‘social condenser’-concept as a way to address new design briefs in conjoint interiors today.

Subjective well-being (SWB) is an emerging research topic in the field of design sciences, whereby various design researchers focus on the key question
‘how to design for SWB’
. Throughout different design disciplines, definitions for SWB are rising and design models and strategies are being developed in an effort to enable designers to increase users’ SWB. However, a clear image of how to design an (interior) architectural environment with the purpose of increasing people’s level of subjective well-being is still in its infancy. In this paper we formulate spatial design missions for (interior) architects that possibly ignite or increase users’ SWB. We start from the general PERMA happiness model of Seligman (2011), modify it to our research needs and illustrate it with material from a design exercise that was carried out by master students in interior architecture in which they had to rethink the communal space system of an existing residential care center. We conclude the paper by formulating seven design missions that, in our viewpoint, allow to augment SWB for elderly persons in residential care environments.

ABSTRACT This research studies the effect of scent expertise (laymen vs. novice experts vs. experts) on product and taste evaluations of three products that are (in)congruent with an ambient scent and examines whether this effect is mediated by these groups’ awareness of scents in their environment and by how well they are able to identify different scents. Results show that novice experts and experts evaluate an incongruent product less positively than laymen. Laymen score lower than novice experts and experts on odor identification, and lower than experts on odor awareness but not lower than novice experts. The differences in the evaluation between the scent expertise groups cannot be fully explained by differences in their level of odor identification or level of odor awareness.

Today’s public discourse on the design of care centers for the elderly population is increasingly emphasizing the importance of subjective well-being (SWB) and the value that architecture and interior architecture can have in this respect. This paper elaborates on a design exercise for 10 groups of 4 master students in interior architecture in which they had to rethink the design of the communal space system of an existing residential care center (RCC) with the goal of augmenting the living experience and SWB of the residents and add potential value for the neighbourhood. This design exercise was developed from the dual perspective of (i) developing spatial solutions for improving the
positive experience and perceived housing quality of elderly in residential care, and (ii) designing architectural spaces based on ethnographic research performed by the student-designers themselves.
The purpose of this research is to develop a design roadmap from the data of the design exercise by analyzing the sequential stages that students ran through and the design strategies that they adopted.
The proposed design road map is a first step in developing a tool that can ultimately assist designers in creating generous and stimulating architectural environments that have a positive effect on SWB.

In architectural practice, residential care centers need to comply with complex restrictions and requirements regarding objective parameters (e.g., measurements due to safety
and accessibility). Paradoxically, this may hinder attention for qualitative aspects such as experience or well-being. Nonetheless, the physical environment has been shown to have the potential to increase well-being. It is therefore important for (interior) architects to gain as much insight as possible in how interior architectural design contributes to individuals’ well-being. The tension between expected experience (prejudices) and actual experience of people towards residential care centers is an interesting angle to approach this complex research topic. Its study can provide opportunities to work out spatial ‘solutions’.
This research is biphasic. First, communal spaces in a selection of residential care centers in the Belgian province of Limburg are documented through photographs. Next, a selection of these
photographs is used as stimulus material in an explorative questionnaire. Our research results indicate that well-being can be approached by interior architectural themes and that environmental dealbreakers and must haves are similar on short- and long-term perspective. Therefore, predicting experiences enables us to construct a positively experienced environment.

The environment in which patients (need to) reside has a great influence on their wellbeing (Ulrich, 1991). That is why introducing 'Design for Wellbeing' is key in the design of palliative environments. People in the last phase of their life become more receptive to environmental stimuli. From our perspective, this triggers design to become even more relevant in such contexts. People's search for subjective well-being (SWB) has promoted a change in vision in the design of new products, services and environments, with a focus not only on material properties, but also on the personal values that trigger actions that can contribute to people's SWB. Such considerations contribute also to proposing answers to the question of how design can support people to have a meaningful life and 'be well' in the best possible way, according to the circumstances. The purpose of this paper is firstly, if design for wellbeing can be performed in the context of palliative care, and secondly, how research could be set up in such a precious context. A thorough literature review will be performed to answer these questions. The value of this study lies in aiming to try to enable terminally ill patients and people from their immediate surroundings to cope with these events via design, and to stimulate people to be able to perform activities that they like (most) and which contribute to their SWB. Keywords: design for wellbeing, palliative care, interior architecture, last phase of life.