A Story Told Via Images

Design a polaroid instant now

This vivid Polaroid pop-up store in Chengdu, created by inkmason and commissioned by LoOneCommune (Polaroid’s sole agency in China), is the result of intensive research on brand positioning, site context, and customer experience. Visitors’ expected brand experience within the space served as the foundation for developing an acceptable design approach, as well as the foundation for developing a design-and-build method suited for use in the brand’s future pop-up stores.

The “process of producing beauty” was utilised as a springboard for the spatial design to communicate Polaroid’s distinctive traits in as pure a way as possible using a clean, modern design language. As a result, the essential features of the location and brand, as well as the dynamic connection inside the intimate space, were accentuated.

LoOneCommune, as a retailer specialising in analogue photographic equipment, is dedicated to preserving the tradition of analogue photography and rapid imaging. Polaroid cameras, in particular, have proven enormously popular with Chinese customers due to their ease-of-use practical qualities, kaleidoscope hues, and capacity to provide rapid, personal emotions.

The notion of the “Toy Box,” a physical shape that conveys both imagination and anticipation, was used to create a highly active setting that encourages child-like wonder and inquiry.

The inkmason design team demarcated this 24 sqm tiny space into a variety of fun arrangements using colours as a paint brush. The spectrum’s hues, conceived as construction parts, are handled as toy blocks and used as three-dimensional components in this pop-up store. The ethereal character of colours becomes concretized in space by mixing them in a flexible and innovative manner, shifting from the plane of flat surfaces to the world of three dimensions. Simultaneously, colour perception generates a highly layered space, creating a spatial experience that elicits an emotional reaction of joie de vivre.

To break free from the site’s restricted compactness, the display windows facing two separate directions were mobilised to create an extroverted, welcoming environment that gives the impression of a distinctive large-scale “installation” when viewed from the street. The interior’s mood extends and stretches outwards, offering visual drama and captivating visitors with its lively presence.

The scaffold shelf lines and strong shapes of concrete blocks are aesthetically changed into a scale of lightness and simplicity, balanced between the virtual and the actual. The space’s border is changed into an open and interchangeable interface, allowing the interior’s dynamic character to expand and refract outwards like a multi-faceted mirror.

The structuring of this small pop-up store, which incorporates the surrounding outer environment into its design approach, gradually increases the ambience of the indoor space while simultaneously creating new urban spatial relationships and architectural spatial scales.

This is not just an example of tailoring an experience to a specific product, but also a solution that meets the criteria of a quick construction process, which was initiated to meet the rigorous deadlines for commercial mall development.
That’s it.

A primary experience of Polaroid cameras is the shortened passage of time, an instant satisfaction process inherent in instant photography. The completed room theoretically depicts “the process of generating beauty” by using elements that suggest the transitional and industrial – scaffolding and concrete blocks – and therefore generates a spatial and visual metaphor of abstract time.

The scaffold shelves are set in a straight fashion that trace a number of lines throughout and around the store, producing a geometric sense of composition and utilising the ‘negative’ space available in an advantageous and pleasant manner while keeping an open, fundamental visual order. Meanwhile, the carefully organised concrete blocks give the store a tactile, textured aspect, emphasising the intimate experience of touching the objects on display, as well as a manner of relating to the space through touch. They work in a similar way to the space bar on a keyboard, allowing for three-dimensional interaction from space to product and back.

“Interior” is the concept of interior, which can be understood as both a physical space, and an abstraction of time. The pop-up store is pre-visualised from the point of view of the space to be created, inside looking out, and in three dimensions.

The project uses the iconic color spectrum of Polaroid at an expanded scale, while visually activating the store for visitors as the variegated colors subtly shift while walking through or past the project.

In doing so, interaction between the brand and consumers is condensed into pure visual attraction or the simple touch of a button – and at this moment, everything becomes possible.

Inkmason’s design, the color spectrum logo acts as a conceptual anchor point, and is an instantly recognizable element which can be easily seen or recorded. The conception and realisation of this design also stem from in kmason’s years of experience with the brand – which has encompassed exploration in all directions and dimensions.