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Store Design preorders open in a week, and I am mostly terrified about it, for all of the regular reasons and a few non-regular reasons. Here is one of the non-regular reasons!
As a practice, store design sits in that rough liminal space between evergreen, mindset-driven practice and thing you do every day. Towards the former, one can only practice store design if they have accepted design at the top of their organization, or convinced those at the top of an organization to accept & act on design. So most of the book is about the messy human process of doing that. Only a little bit is about the actual practice of design, which is boring and practicable by just about anyone.
It’s also been written about elsewhere, across dozens of books about research & synthesis. I don’t think I can write anything new about research. Other authors are better at teaching you about interviewing, running card sorts, or analyzing heat & scroll maps. I can write about doing those things for stores, which involves asking a few more specifically useful questions. But ultimately, techniques will fade, and all that will matter going forward is whether or not design matters. This is the dialectic of contemporary tech: it kills & renews, and only process will remain.
As a result of this, I have been asking myself a lot of questions as I write. What is durable here? Where is the starting ground? What blind spots might radically change the field going forward? What are people getting wrong right now? Will that change?
The goal is always to make something that is worthy of the printed page. We could release Store Design as an ebook tomorrow and be done with it. I don’t think it belongs in that format, primarily because the practice has been observed for over two decades. Over those two decades, ecommerce has grown to a multi-trillion(!) dollar market, creating some of the largest companies on the planet. Towards that end, it boggles my mind that there are no texts specifically about store design yet.
I promise I’ll stop writing metatext about Store Design shortly, but a lot of you like my books and I think that a few bits about the creative process might be interesting to mull over. We’ll see shortly if I’m proven right about any of this.