I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.

33arquitectures:

While individual mall stores offered their own theme environments, the design of the mall as a whole proved even more compelling to early mall-goers. Studies showed that shoppers went to the mall for the mall itself. They thought malls were beautiful, and wanted to behold the spectacle. Many people said they enjoyed the sense of “escape” they felt there. Stimulated by sound and light, they were distracted from their daily worries. Lonely suburbanites said they felt less isolated, and the overworked experienced a pleasurable “loss of time.” Follow-up researchers, using video cameras to capture shoppers’ faces, discovered something even more interesting: shortly after entering a mall, a person’s expression went blank. The jaw dropped, the eyes glazed over, and the shopper’s path through the mall became less directed. This phenomenon, named the Gruen Transfer, was defined as the moment when a person changes from a customer with a particular product in mind to an undirected impulse buyer. Clearly, the tenants at the mall preferred the latter. In spite of Gruen’s original intentions, his mall gave retailers an unprecedented opportunity to use place to disorient consumers even further. Retail architects developed a subspecialty called “atmospherics,” the science of manipulating shoppers’ senses to make them buy more. They discovered that obscuring the time of day led customers to spend more time in the mall. Forcing people to make three turns when walking from the parking lot into the mall led them to forget in which direction they had parked the car (and you thought it was just you). Without this sense of an anchor, customers walked around more aimlessly. The floors in the corridors were made of harder materials than the floors in the stores, subtly encouraging tired shoppers inside. Studies on smell led corporations to concoct trademarked scents for each of their store brands. Muzak’s research team developed sound tracks capable of making people chew food faster, try on more clothes, or spend more money.

The Rehabilitation of the Fragment