New Media Communication @ Tunxis CC - Spring 2007

I am not an artist. The attached illustration is absolutely not to scale and though I took some notes, I’m sure that I left out some things. It’s awfully suspicious to go walking around a Best Buy store and take notes–at least that’s how I felt–so my own self-consciousness was a detriment to my spacemapping in this instance. Hopefully my observations (in the form of a concise essay) are more valuable than my drawing.

The entrance is located near the center of the store immediately to the right of the exit. Where people go in, people go out. Inside the door is a man standing at a workstation. He’s posted there to acknowledge every person who comes in and goes out which discourages shoplifting. His presence and that of his workstation keep us walking to the right. This reminds me a lot of those splash pages on websites where you can enter your zipcode, or sign up for a candidate’s e-mail list before you continue. When you enter the Best Buy, you don’t have to go to the right, just like when you see a splash page you don’t have to enter your info. On the website, if you can find the eensy weensy link, you can “continue to the main site” and in the store if you want to go against the flow of all the lines at the entrance, you can go straight to the loss-leaders that are set up by the cash registers (Best Buy would rather you go around their whole store and check out the other stuff before picking up the latest CDs that they’re selling at cost or a loss).

The path of least resistance through the store takes you around past the greatest number of sections, in sort of a loop ending up by the cash registers and the exit doors (which are on the other side of the gatekeeper guy). On a website, you don’t have to exit through the splash page, you can exit whenever you want from whatever section you’re browsing. Because Best Buy is a physical architectural space, it has to have a sort of pre-defined path to maximize revenue.

Some New Media elements are incorporated into the Best Buy retail store. If what you’re looking for is not in stock, you can use a kiosk to purchase the item online from BestBuy.com. I realize that this is a tenuous connection to New Media through the principles of modularity and numerical representation. The store has some modular elements. Each week, as new films or albums come out, displays are changed at the front of the store. A promotional merchandise display for a blockbuster film can be put into place and later removed without affecting the rest of the store, much like a pic-of-the-day feature on a website can be updated without monkeying with the site.

The honorary sixth principle of New Media, Interactivity, is present in this space in the form of demonstration models. Want to try out the PS3 before you buy it? Pick up the controller and play. Not sure which MP3 player will be easiest to operate? Grab one that’s tethered to the display and try navigating its menu. Almost all of the laptop computers and desktop PCs are plugged in and logged on for interactive demonstration and trial. Obviously, all of this interactivity is in service to the store’s goal of selling something, not in service of entertainment.

The flow of the store is not restricted, but it’s not exactly open. I’d describe the flow as “suggested”. As you may be able to see in the drawing above, there’s a path leading from the entrance to the right and back, then across to the left and then back down to the cash registers. Compared to a New Media space, like a video game, the store space is similar. If you play a Grand Theft Auto game, you can roam around the city doing as you please, but there are guided missions. Same with a game like Super Mario 64. You can wander around in the 3-D environments, swimming, running, and jumping then just turn the game off. That’s akin to walking around a Best Buy and checking everything out and then leaving without buying.