Thirza Prentice – 2nd February 2012
Environmental Stress
Tonight was my first visit to the new Westfield at Stratford. I went with my boyfriend who I obviously care about, however we ended up leaving the place hating each other a little bit. In a later discussion with said boy, when back on speaking terms, I thought a little bit more about why…
Our mission was to find a group birthday present for one of our friends. The fact that the place is huge was not helped by the distinct lack of maps around during the first at least half-hour of wandering. This was particularly annoying as we knew where we wanted to go, but just didn’t know how.
Everything is SO SHINY, the walls, ceilings, signs, handrails, floor.
This, coupled with the intense competition between brands to catch your attention just makes the place quite distressing. It’s a massive overload resulting in you continuing to wander, not really sure where to go or what to look at. Despite the mammoth size of the place and the fact that it was getting late, it still felt like trying to battle through a tube station at rush hour and there weren’t even that many people around. This is probably more to do with poor store layout than anything, but did not help the mood, which resulted in misplaced stress and irritation.
The experience reminded me of many of our mentors commenting on how fast technology is advancing. There are constantly new groundbreaking developments for us to interact with and use, however all new advances have to be brought back down to earth, to a human level, in order for us to want to engage. With regards to Westfield, you can make a place bigger and cleaner and more sparkly, but it doesn’t mean at all that the average human will enjoy spending time in that environment.
To flip this all around, I do actually love going shopping. I think I have realised however that being in the right frame of mind in the first place is very important. We were on a mission tonight and obviously not in the mood for intrusion, or for anything to be made more difficult that it already was. If you are mentally prepared to submerse yourself in a full day of shopping at a place like this I feel you are also more prepared to deal with the bombardment. Therefore meaning there definitely are times when we are feeling more accepting of brand intrusion. It’s just up to them to figure out exactly when.
