Eye Magazine

A few weeks ago I attended the BEST awards, the premier design awards in New Zealand, writes Nick Kapica of Massey University. I was very pleased that our College of Creative Arts (CoCA) swept the board within the student awards.

One of the new ventures we have been exploring at Massey is a collaborative project between visual communication students and spatial design students: ‘the MACPAC_20 Concept Store’. It’s been very successful, and picked up a gold award in the spatial design category.

This project is a collaboration between two typographic design students and one spatial design student. The work is a site-specific concept store for Macpac located in Mercer Street, Wellington.

Kinetics are fundamental to outdoor experiences as well as interactive technologies. The sequential movement through atmospheres, spaces, zones and altitudes, in combination with motion technologies, became our conceptual basis. Interactive technologies bring outdoor experiences into the retail space. This, combined with the circular form, creates an immersive experience for Macpac customers, not only surrounding but also engaging them to interact with the store.

This Macpac concept store stocks only the top twenty products and is changed seasonally. The customer is able to purchase these twenty items from the store, and is also able to virtually browse through the rest of the current catalogue using the digital technology of touch screen displays.

Above: The Gold pin awarded to Gold BEST award winners

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