Lost

Shopping and it's affects on the social life in the contemporary society had become debate factor that links different fields of interests and activity like design , architecture , art and social theory . The debates that are generated out of this subject are the ones that are related to the way e look at shopping and how it influences the daily life and what can be called daily activities . Shopping has been infiltrating in a lot of social activities and in a city that is big and has a an increased flow of people and cultural diversity shopping becomes more that just a ordinary activity that is related to the act of buying and the need for having material possessions.Shopping can be is some cases and intereting activity because of the abundance that one person have to face in it's case ; on a different level this abundance can make things thrilling because of the fact that one can get lost into the sea of products that appears in its way and getting lost can become a fun experience . Shopping is connected to the way people socialize and in most cases can be an activity that is not necessarily connected to the act of buying and consuming different types of products .Social behavior can be influenced by the way the spaces dedicated to the activity of shopping function and are connected . For example the way people interact in a situation like the situation a shopping street is quite different from the situation of one mall space . In a lot of cities because of the lack of space and because of the fact that in manny cases shopping is connected to the center of a city and in a big percent of these cases the center is part of the historic inheritage of the city thus bringing together the modern element of shopping with the" historical" and memory of the city . In this case shopping is build in an urban tissue where in the complex grid of the street the stores are inserted in the spaces that are connected to the street level ; making in this way shopping an activity that is happening as movement 50 percent on the outside and 50 percent on the inside . In the example of a mall that is build around the idea of shopping as a contemporary activity that requires a fluid and unitary space in witch all the functions are gathered under one " roof " . Shopping is connected to the daily life in multiple ways and as a concept the shopping activity is a complex activity that can become part of a much more larger interpretation than the interpretation in witch the activity is connected to one meaning or conceptual understanding . If we think about shopping as a day to day activity then things can be thought in a larger way and shopping can be seen as a basic human activity . In this way shopping become an evolutionary component that is added to the urban life . Going to the local supermarket an buying food and outer things that are needed in the daily life reinforces the concept of shopping as a concept that is related to basic lifestyle . In this way there is no difference (conceptually) between an normal shopping day in a store from the way shopping goes on in a supermarket , the things that make the difference is the product and the space . Space elevates shopping to different levels and can transform this activity in a fundamental way from the way we are used to look at it . Space and the way it is designed makes out of shopping an activity that is blended with entertainment , art , performance and technology . The space is the stage and shopping is the action that takes place with the help of architecture . The shopping activity requires a space that is artificial , without it it would not exist and it could not happen as a mass and individual phenomenon . This artificiality is brought by design and the creation of an environment that can accommodate from the technology that is required to mantain the proper functioning of the space and the system that goes in parallel with it . Shopping is an artificial manufactured activity that could not take place and that would not have any logic without the human factor that generates the interaction needed for it to take place . The place where the activity takes place is the starting point for a new and different way of looking at program based architecture and to what mixed used program means .The shopping activity has infiltrated in many fields and it transformed because of it's require public space in a new breed of space that is multifunctional and cannot be defined in a stabile way as program and theory . The fact that shopping brings together multiple activities makes buildings that have spaces that are dedicated to it to become mixed used buildings that accommodate multiple types of programs that have different and hybrid functions that all form the context for things to happen and become possible . Because of this simple activity that has basic trade rules the programs that have to sustain it have to morph in new types of programs that can be looked at as conclusions to pervious models . In the case of shopping hosting the morphing of programs into new or hybrid types goes faster as a conceptual phenomenon than the usual way of architectural program evolution . The need for space and new functions for the activity of shopping has increased the speed of architectural thinking an theory giving birth to new branches or satellites to already existing companies . The fact that programs that are related to shopping embed in some cases transdisciplinary theories and facts make architectural thinking become more complex and different from what it was as a program oriented platform . In this case the concept stage is divided into multiple parts that come together in the final stage of the concept . These parts are steps that have to be made by the designers or the architects in order to create what can be looked at or considered as an outcome for the whole process . The first step that has to be made is a research stage in witch the constraints and the demands of the project have to be analyzed and looked at with different eyes than the classical way of looking at an architectural process . This way of looking at problems has to embed a transdiscilinary way of thinking and leave space for multiple possibilities and ways of relating to solutions . In this faze of the concept the important part is to focus on leaving space for arguments and not to start with a precise direction because shopping or the architecture that is related to this class of public activities relates to people both in an mass and individual private way ; the architecture has to integrate elements that make in the same time a larger number of consumers and an individual consumer to feel different and special . So the concept has to appeal both to the public and to the private in the same way with the same means that have different interpretations for different scales of looking at things . Shopping in manny cases is a brand oriented activity in witch the design of the space has to reflect the ideas behind the brand and the personality of the brand . The way in witch a concept that is related to shopping has to be materialized resembles with making a song or music in general ; it is a combination of layers with hard tunes and soft detail oriented accurate fine tuning . This way of building a concept for a store has to be as a thinking system somewhere in between the micro world of the details that are found inside and that relate to the human scale of the project and the macro world of the brand concept and expression .