The commercial world is often accused of stealing ideas from the arts, but inspiration can flow in more than one direction. Here, Andy Cameron of Benetton's Fabrica research centre argues that recent developments combining interaction design and retailing could teach the art world a thing or two.

In his essay 'Learning from Prada', Lev Manovich connects art theory and retail store design via the concept of 'augmented space'. He argues that Prada's revolutionary flagship store in New York, designed in 2001 by Reed Kram and Rem Koolhaus, has been transformed into a hybrid of the virtual and the real, a retail space digitally augmented through the addition of electronic and interactive display systems which superimpose layers of virtual data over the real store interior. Reading between the lines, Manovich appears to suggest that "the avant-garde wing of retail industry" has something to teach the art world about the ways in which spaces and data, objects and images can be combined in novel and unprecedented ways. Reed Kram's plasma display 'mirror', for example, which displaces its reflection to the opposite side of the changing room with a short time delay, thereby showing the customer what they looked like from behind a few seconds earlier, is both a clever marketing device and a rather interesting and successful interactive art installation.

This notion of a productive relationship between art and retail is supported by my own experiences of working in interaction design. In both of the commercial studios that I have been involved in - antirom and romandson - there has been little formal separation between work for commercial clients and work for the gallery. Indeed, it was often clear to me that projects we created at antirom for Levi Strauss, or at Romandson for Paul Smith or IBM were as creatively innovative and aesthetically exciting as anything going on in the more rarified atmosphere of the art world.

Benetton of course, has long blurred the distinction between art and retail. Part of the force of Oliveiro Toscani's astonishing photo campaigns for Benetton lay precisely in the dislocation of the images from their normal space in the gallery or photo art book. However radical the images - the copulating horses, the dying HIV patient with his family around him, the black nursemaid suckling the white infant - nothing was more shocking than the inclusion of that small green rectangle with the words 'united colors of benetton'. This was the part that made the real difference, this was the part that proclaimed the art photography to be a marketing image. It was this juxtaposition between art and retail that many viewers found to be the most shocking aspect of Benetton's campaigns.

Fabrica Interactive is currently adapting this radical approach to marketing communication into a bold interactive strategy for Benetton. For example, United People is a project which places video messaging terminals in Benetton megastores around the world. Customers create an online video identity for other customers to see and to respond to. The idea is to target the post-internet generation by adapting Benetton's marketing approach to reflect the changes in communication - the web, mobile phones and text messaging, online chat and so on - which teenagers and twenty somethings now take for granted. Benetton has always used racially and ethnically diverse models within its marketing images. Why not take advantage of the global spread of Benetton outlets - 4000 stores around the world - and involve real customers in making images of themselves within Benetton's network of stores and on the website? Instead of Benetton representing the diversity of the world, why not let the world, via Benetton, represent itself?

United People uses Apple E-macs as video kiosks and local DSL services to connect to an Oracle database and Benetton's web servers. Users put themselves online, look at the faces already in the database and send messages to anyone that appeals to them. The system can be used to flirt, play, show off, or simply send messages to friends. United People is currently installed in Benetton stores in Hong Kong, Rome and Birmingham and will be extended to Barcelona, Moscow and London in the next 2 months. Already Benetton are taking advantage of the system to run local marketing initiatives like the highly popular 'Are You the Face of Birmingham?' promotion which ran in the Birmingham Bull Ring store between September and December 2003. One Birmingham 'face' will be selected to be photographed as a Benetton model in February 2004.

United People augments the space of the Benetton megastore with a virtual network which mirrors the global retail network and in which the global customer can insert his or her message. It gives a voice, and a face, to the client. It reverses the usual flow of communcation, whereby the corporation speaks and the consumer listens. It's also a lot of fun. You never know, it might just catch on.

About the Author:

Andy Cameron is currently Creative Director in Interactive at Fabrica www.fabrica.it, the Benetton communication research centre. He co-founded the antirom and romandson studios in London and established the Hypermedia Research Centre at the University of Westminster.

You can see the United People at www.benetton.com/unitedpeople.

Lev Manovich's "Learning from Prada" can be found at www.noemalab.org/sections/ideas/ideas_articles/pdf/manovich_augmented_space.pdf.