Chaohong Database, A Tail-eating Gluttonous Snake Game.
Production today is not merely the production of products, but also the production of consumer desire and consumer passion as well as the production of consumers. —— Baudrillard
With the iteration of consumption and the continued alienation of consumer hierarchy, new words and symbols are continuously created and then consumed. In the 1960s, Guy Debord wrote that spectacle construction has become a key link in a consumerist society and the decisive structure in the mode of material production has started to shift to the image-oriented mode of spectacle production. 50 years later, the popularization of the mobile internet and the explosion of information make spectacle construction increasingly fast and diverse and make everyone present a participant and builder of consumption spectacle.
ZIPLAB is a cross-border e-commerce offline experience store within the business ecosystem of Onion Global and tries to create a brand-new economic circle for young users. Beijing Road Store in Guangzhou and Haikou Wanda Store, as the presentations of the same series, aim to explore how to build the link between people and products, establish the interaction between people and achieve the integration between man and scene, thus creating greater traffic value and generating more experiential social consumption, through symbols, metaphors and spectacle construction in the contemporary context.
Cross-border e-commerce going from online to offline is a process similar to file compression, which needs to put as many as products and cultures as possible in a space; while in bricks-and-mortar stores, leading offline experience back to online traffic is a process of decompression, which makes consumers learn about the powerful endorsement behind the brand and offers consumers with more choices online.
Beijing Road Store, Guangzhou
ZIPLAB Beijing Road Store in Guangzhou is designed based on the concept of “Database”, and parallels in-store experience path and brand storyline. The store is divided into three zones: Archive Hall, Charging Tower, and Data Vault.
ARCHIVE HALL
In the towering archive hall in the entrance, the acrylic wall vertically supports the entire hall; while the jewelry cabinet horizontally extends through the entire store. As the protagonist of the entry space, this compressed jewelry wall, as the leading part in the entrance, is like the “arsenal” blown open in a game, where players choose their own equips according to their preferences and attributes. Besides sales function, the entire space offers consumers a brand-new scene for independent exploration.
The two axial dislocations formed by the vertical acrylic wall and the horizontal stainless-steel cabinet make the far end seem to narrow and strongly directive. Coupled with the guidance of light strips, it effectively resolves the diversion problem of the L-shaped plane turning and leads people to deeper experience.
The antechamber ingeniously forms a front section and a back section through angular dislocation and the partition of the acrylic wall, enabling waiting area, pickup area, blind boxes and other extra spaces to hide behind; the impending LED screen aside continuously shows ZIPLAB’s attitude of selecting the best things in the world.
CHARGING TOWER
The Charging Tower is in the center of the entire store and is the lobby to the vault; here is the process of unzipping a compressed file and the place where the product barcodes explode and scatter. The fragmented installation on the top is like an exploded energy board, clustering and concentrating in the burly illuminant cylinder. The shelves on both sides are placed symmetrically, layer upon layer and ascending like a hill.
DATA VAULT
Into the Data Vault, this mysterious space surrounded by illuminants is like a treasure vault. The center of the space is a data transmission tower which symbolizes time and space, and it is like a precision instrument that connects the online and the offline. The luminous wall generates a virtual image that extends infinitely through upper and lower mirrors, implying the cyberworld.
Project Information:
Project Name: ZIPLAB Off-line Store
Design Firm: PMT Partners Ltd.
Website: www.pmt-partners.com
Contact E-mail: pmtpartners@163.com
Principal Architects: Yan Hu , Zhe Zeng , Weihao Zhao
Project Director: Zhenlin Gu, Mianshi Lin
Design Team: Haozheng Guan, Yongjun Lin, Cheng Pang, Yihui Chen
Photographs: Zhe Zeng.
Client: Onion Global
