From Top Left Clockwise: Loves Me/Loves Me Not, Mini Love Blind, The Girls, Mini Sweetheart Note Set

Varied in style and sentiment, there will be an occasion where one of these is going to work in your favor!

From Top Left Clockwise: Mini Shadows Of Love, Mini Mittens, The Ol’ Ball And Chain, Love Blind Heart

From Top Left Clockwise:  Figures Of Love, BIG Feeling, Mini Heart, Shot Through The Heart

Guess where they’re being sold?  Only in our BRAND SPANKING NEW STORE!  Where you can buy ephemera for all manner of occasions, here look:

Cards, All Sorts

So there it is, check out the store and buy some cards for your loved ones, or not so loved ones.

The objective of the virtual grocery store is to make productive use of commuters’ waiting time by saving shoppers time spent going to the supermarket and, of course, advertising Tesco’s hypermarket which is currently under construction.

Because I have never lived in South Korea, I am not going to speak to how this product would succeed or fail in the context of South Korea. Because I do live in a city with the busiest metro system in the Western Hemisphere and an ever-growing, overworked labor force I am going to discuss this product in the context of my own home metropolis, New York City.

Like a real grocery store the aisles and shelves look bright, glossy, orderly…appealing. Such a cleanly rendered, realistic depiction of store aisles taken out their context and plunged into a space which is both hopeful (the ride home) and dreadful (the often hot, stinky wait) creates a tension which makes it feel almost like an art installation. And yet, in a space where commuters are preconditioned to be inundated with the ever-cycling advertisements of the day, I can’t help but wonder if  New Yorkers wouldn’t just perceive this as an ad and thus be discouraged from actually interacting with it. Unless of course it was a product and an interface that the consumer was already comfortable using, such as Fresh Direct.

Fresh Direct is an online grocery store serving the New York City metrpolitan area. Shoppers order online and then FD delivers them at the customer’s desired date and time. Here at Swayspace this is the service that we use to order groceries for lunches in the studio each week.  For the first time last week I was in charge of putting in our order. Ordering packaged products like chips and cookies feels normal since these products look and taste the same almost every time I purchase them. Ordering cold cuts, fresh bread and ready-to-eat meals is a different story. A thumbnail image of Fresh Direct’s multigrain pullman loaf doesn’t say much to me when I can’t pick it up to feel it’s weight, density and color. These items arrived like a surprise as though someone else had more control over what arrived in our cardboard boxes than I did. The experience left me a little feeling uneasy. But as with anything, time and repetition would likely breed familiarity and I very well might look forward to tackling my Fresh Direct order while waiting for my ride home.

A few people responded to Tesco’s advertisement by suggesting that we take this model a step further to create whole stores with dynamic aisles of screens. This would allow product placement to be adjusted, sale items highlighted and prices managed from afar while taking up less physical real estate with the lack of aisle space needed for shopping carts and cashiers. Over time and generations could we slowly loose our attachments to the sensory inputs a grocery store: the smell of muffins from the bakery in the morning, the chill in the freezer aisles, the convenient candy bar on your way to checkout. In considering the possibilities of such an interface, the problems of substituting the usual sensory experiences of grocery shopping pose clear hurdles to designers trying to engage their users.

In a city where the urban working dwellers spend long hours in the office and usually can’t wait to get home to their young ones or out to the bar for a cold drink this just might work (that is if you can get used to getting shoved out of the way as you reach to scan the milk). For now,  I’ll continue to cherish it when the butcher hands me a slice of turkey to test it’s thickness and when I press my finger into an avocado and know I’ll be able to eat it the next day.

what follows are various shots of the month long process:

these colors are my favorite combination

the full set, fronts and backs, finally realized

]]> http://swayspace.com/blog/2009/11/taking-care-of-business-cards/feed/ 0 http://swayspace.com/blog/2009/05/new-rooftop-films-program-guides/ http://swayspace.com/blog/2009/05/new-rooftop-films-program-guides/#comments Fri, 22 May 2009 22:52:18 +0000 Willy http://swayspace.com/blog/?p=243 Hot off the press – new Program Guides for the 2009 Rooftop Films season.

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(We already mentioned this, but have added a better photo to the portfolio.)

BackStory Identity

Hall & Partners Health

SMP Career Manual

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Via: Daring Fireball