Open House is a space for Target to tell an Internet of Things (IoT) story and educate its guests, partners, and executives. It is a learning lab from which many potential new businesses can grow in the emerging industry of IoT.
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Open House: Context
Goals: create a space for consumers to learn about the Internet of Things (IoT) and begin the journey for Target to develop an IoT strategy
Problems / constraints: designing a connected experience in a fractured IoT ecosystem that is clear and compelling to guests, getting companies to open up their closed APIs to create interactive experiences in the store, clear distinction between smart devices and contextual props
Role: lead designer, researcher, prototyper
Dubbed "IoT Playgrounds," a series of popup spaces were explored to start understanding what it means to create an experiential retail space for smart products. IoT Playground #1 was focused on pulling products out of their boxes and placing them into a "living room" space. Playground #1 was located at Dijital Fix on Valencia St. in San Francisco.
Each product was given a display card that tried to balance features and lifestyle benefits, where traditional retail tends to put more of a focus on technical specs.
In addition to doing over 50 intercepts and surveys with store visitors over 4 days, an event was hosted one night with smart device makers (e.g. August, Nomiku, Roost, Jawbone) to have a roundtable discussion about how retail can help both startups and national brands in the quickly evolving IoT industry.
For IoT Playground #2 a more abstracted approach to the "living environment" was taken based on store visitor feedback and insights from the previous Playground. In #1 we learned that visitors were confused about which products we were showcasing: furniture or smart products. To address this, the furniture in #2 was all washed in white, as well as showcasing 3 different spaces sectioned together: kitchen, nursery, and living room.
The introduction of 3 living spaces shown in a single retail space allowed visitors to experience the "connectivity" between the smart products. Where #1 focused on individual products, #2 focused more on interconnectivity stories, for example, "how can my house help me when my baby wakes up crying in the middle of the night?"
The product cards began to talk about individual products from an interconnectivity perspective.
Kitchenette with a smart coffee maker.
Paper prototypes of an IoT platform and device compatibility experience, eventually refined for the final Open House design.
Location of the store at 115 4th St, San Francisco, CA 94123
The final store design features two distinct spaces. Shown here is the interior of the "vignette space" which features an acrylic house and furniture, digitized with a full, 3-room projection wall to tell interactive stories and educate guests about the interconnectivity of smart products to help solve life's everyday and significant problems.
The second space in the store was dedicated to providing individual product experiences; a space for guests to go deep on products, their benefits, and understand which ecosystems they are compatible with. This space features interactive touch tables with unique content design specifically for Open House.
Abstracting even further from the pure white furniture, the vignette space was designed in such a way that it becomes a wireframe of a house where the smart products and displayed stories are the drivers of the experience. The bedroom here tells a story of how smart devices, working together, can calmly alert you of a leak from a nighttime storm.
The living room tells interactive stories such as, "how can my smart home protect me from a burglary?" Or, "how can my smart home make sure I leave the house safe and efficiently in the morning?"
Mounts for products were designed to make the products feel almost like art objects, something precious that would evoke curiosity and engagement from guests in the store.
One of the main purposes of the store is to create a space that is easily iterated on and experimented with. First of the experiments was the beginning of a partnership with Indiegogo, where campaigning products could show off prototypes in a physical space. We received a lot of positive feedback from guests in the store who felt it was reassuring to seeing crowdsourcing campaigns actually showing real prototypes with a brand like Target.
