Designing Innovative Retail Environments in Retail and Consumer Studies

Juanjuan Wu is a professor of retail merchandising in the College of Design at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Her research focuses on the design aspects of retailing, mainly in the area of fashion retailing.

Check out Juanjuan’s Assignment

Please describe your assignment in a paragraph or two.

This virtual reality design project—"Future Grocery Store Design 2030"—provides students with the opportunity to conceptually design a unique, future-oriented community grocery retail space for the year 2030, based on an understanding of local consumer needs and retailing trends. Students are expected to consider the clean and green/organic food consumption needs of local communities. They use SketchUp to design their store, which can be viewed in immersive virtual reality environments using a VR headset.

Goals of the Project:

• To develop an understanding of local food systems and to research and project food shopping needs and grocery retailing trends for 2030, including merchandise mix, layout, display, signage preferences, technology, and more.
• To create a store with a highly functional and aesthetically stimulating layout and display mechanisms, as well as an overall satisfying experience for local shoppers.
• To learn the digital design tool SketchUp for rendering ideas for a retail space.
• To leverage rendering and multiple forms of research to compellingly present design ideas.

How does the assignment work in your class? What learning does it support?

Overall, this assignment has worked well in my class. It supports spatial learning, design thinking, visual and data analyses, and writing skills. It notably democratizes design. Unlike other design major students, Retail and Consumer Studies (RCS) students are not trained in drawing and illustration skills, which becomes a barrier in visualizing and communicating their store merchandising and design ideas. However, virtual reality design tools, such as SketchUp, empower non-design students to be creative and effective in generating and communicating their ideas. Equipped with retail merchandising and management knowledge, RCS students are uniquely positioned to integrate business with design. The SketchUp VR design tool provides a relatable scale and user-generated, crowd-sourced 3D models (e.g., merchandise and fixtures) that students can easily adopt and edit. Its realism and immersion allow RCS students, with limited training in visual representation, to innovate and design retail stores for targeted markets. In this regard, RCS students design the stores combining both the managerial and user perspectives.

How have you developed and refined this assignment over time?

I initially used Mockshop as the virtual reality design tool, which specifically focused on the fashion industry. It is considered a type of non-immersive VR tool, in contrast to the immersiveness of SketchUp. SketchUp is more robust in the sense that it is compatible with VR headsets and can be applied to all types of products, including food and fashion. In addition to this change, I have also shifted the themes of the assignment from time to time, such as focusing on luxury fashion or sustainability.

What advice would you give to other instructors who would like to develop a similar assignment?

Ensure clarity in both the requirements of the assignment and the grading rubric.

What do students say about the assignment? How have they found it valuable?

Students find the 1:1 scale and visual effects in the VR store impressive and simulating—intellectually as well as visually. They become more engaged, excited, and invested in the learning process. Watching the stores they create come into life in the VR headset gives them a strong sense of pride in their achievements and is motivating. As a result, they are attentive to details and nuances in design, often finding creative solutions to problems encountered during the design process. They also value both the peer and instructor reviews that are conducted in the VR environment, along with the subsequent feedback. Students consistently highlight the VR studio at the Health Science Libraries, as well as the dedicated support from Charlie Heinz and Scott Spicer, as among the most appreciated aspects of their experience.

Juanjuan, along with graduate student Shiman Li and librarian Scott Spicer documented students’ responses to the assignment in their recent article.

What We Like about Juanjuan’s Assignment

The assignment is introduced. Juanjuan's prompt begins with an overview that precedes the learning goals and the logistics of the assignment. Given the complexity of an assignment involving research, design, technology, and collaboration, the overview is valuable for providing students with the big picture before delving into the details.

The assignment is forward-thinking. As with Yvette Reibel's assignment in Dental Hygiene, Juanjuan's assignment requires students to draw on a repertoire of skills and abilities developed over the course of the semester. Because of this, forward-thinking assignments, like Juanjuan's, are often introduced early in the term and developed in stages over the course of the semester.

Goals are clearly articulated. Students sometimes feel lost in or overwhelmed by complex, multi-part assignments. By foregrounding learning outcomes that students will achieve through the project, Juanjuan provides students a rationale for the project's design that promotes motivation and engagement. By connecting these goals to the specific tasks students will complete, she increases students' motivation to persist through the stages of the project and makes connections among the components of the project clear.

Learning is authentic and multimodal. Juanjuan's assignment offers students opportunities to engage their topic through a range of tasks and multiple modes (ways of communicating). Students conduct their own library research, analysis of examples, and primary data collection; synthesize information; apply their information in creating a virtual reality design; and craft a presentation of their research and their design. The assignment not only provides students multiple ways to apply and demonstrate their learning about course concepts, but also gives authentic practice with research and design as they are practiced in the field of retail and consumer studies.

Strong collaboration is required and valued. Because teams work together to apply their research in one cohesive design, they must meaningfully collaborate--not just "divide and conquer." Assignments promote generative collaborations when all team members must contribute for the project to be successful.

Learning is deepend through discipline-specific writing genres. Juanjuan's assignment requires students to write in multiple genres—literature reviews, storyboards, slide decks. Some genres, such as mood boards, are quite specific to disciplinary fields. Writing activities that feature discipline-specific genres can be quite effective at helping students develop insights into the ways of thinking and knowing in their major and course of study.

Read more about Using Writing in Your Course-Specific Context.

Criteria are task-specific. When the language of the assignment prompt mirrors and aligns with the assessment language, students are better prepared to meet expectations. In the rubric, Juanjuan reinforces key features from the assignment description, such as determining the needs of the community, developing 3D designs, and collaborating professionally.

Read more about criteria and rubrics.

Check out Juanjuan's assignment.