Designing Meaningful Retail Experiences by Adopting a Scenario-Driven Approach. The “Shaping Retail Innovation” Pilot Project

In a context of technological transformation impacting the production, distribution and consumption patterns, processes and dynamics of goods and services, the retail system is today strongly influenced by the overlapping of the traditional physical dimension and the new and ever-present digital layer and requires experimenting with new approaches to bring meaningful innovations into the system. Design, in particular, finds itself redefining its role in relation to the other competence domains operating in retail - among others management, marketing and IT - and having to experiment with new tools and approaches to bring meaningful innovation to the sector. Within this framework the article presents the results of the pilot project “Shaping Retail Innovation” conducted within the FoReSeE – Forecasting Retail Service Experiences – basic research, discussing: (i) how applying Design-Orienting Scenarios could push meaningful retail solutions by envisioning how to embed advanced technology within the retail customer experience; (ii) how adopting a meta design approach could improve a multidisciplinary collaboration among design and IT promoting meaning-driven retail innovations with a long-term perspective.