MeTA-LiFE

Zhihan Zhao

‘The arsenal of commercial techniques that retail has developed can no longer function as usual, retail’s techniques of attraction and distraction have become visible in a new way. Stripped of their use value, they reveal themselves as techniques of pure display.’

—Fredi Fischli and Adam Jasper, 2021

Human development is an iterative process. The renewal of the world makes the traditional business have to face a change, and the development of technology has brought a lot of opportunities. In this context, the project first makes an overall research on retail, digital space and other related fields through literature analysis, case study and interdisciplinary research methods, and then makes user portraits and user journey maps to analyze and reconstruct consumers’ behavior in the purchase process.

‘Build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensatory dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true’ (Huxley, 2000) 

‘Liquid consumer utopia’ and ‘New Babylon (Situationist International)’ are the main theories in this project. I regard Utopian consumption as the key factor affecting consumption, and liquid consumer Utopia as the future development direction, which relates the spiritual space design and consumption behavior, and discusses the relationship between man and abstract space.

‘The idea that human beings can replace the world-that-is with another and different world, entirely of their making, was almost wholly absent from human thought before the advent of modern times’ (Bauman, 2007) 

On the basis of theory, the project takes co creation as a way to increase consumers’ creativity and sense of participation, highlights the importance of individual creativity in future consumption scenarios, aims to put forward some possible development directions for the future of retail and digital space, and discusses the significance of future digital space in reflecting people’s psychological needs. Based on ‘Metaverse’, digital space, as a place to break through physical constraints, is considered to be a medium that can meet some human instinctive needs. It can be said that the meta universe, as a dematerialized physical world (Jon, R, 2021), can connect the virtual world with people’s real life.

Finally, the project has produced an immersive, decentralized and highly personalized digital shopping platform. Consumer space can be created by consumers, which is not only a process of increasing interest, but also a symbol and metaphor for people to break through the fixed places created by the spectacle society and regain real fun. This decentralized space may also be seen as an ideal way to break the capital monopoly.

Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZNI0RJiNvw&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=zhihanzhao