We tend to assume that supermarkets are static, neutral spaces where little of significance ever happens. In reality, the supermarket is a highly volatile, hyper-competitive spatial landscape. Its shelves operate as an occupiable three-dimensional bar graph, revealing patterns of economics, culture, consumer behavior, and competition. Material, lighting, sound, circulation, display systems, refrigeration, and architecture all influence how people move through this interior environment and perceive the products within it.

The supermarket shelf is equally dynamic. Products struggle to maximize every possible advantage in an effort to lure consumers away from competitors. What may once have been an issue of attention-grabbing graphics applied to packaging has become a far more complex spatial and material problem. The contemporary consumer in today’s strained economy demands tangible value from the products they consume. To survive, brands must wrestle with issues that range from the ergonomics of the hand and the complex geometries of the refrigerator to the atmosphere of retail environments and sustainable material innovations that determine a product’s afterlife. These are multi-scalar design problems that architects and designers are uniquely suited to address.

The seminar will begin by treating the supermarket itself as a site. Students will document and interrogate its dimensions, circulation, obstructions, materiality, lighting, acoustics, display systems, and other environmental conditions, considering how these elements shape perception and behavior. From this architectural foundation, students will operate as brand strategists, examining how products occupy, respond to, and compete within that space. Rather than inventing new products, students will innovate upon existing brands. Outdated supermarket products will be reconsidered from the top down, including brand identity, consumer target, logo, packaging, materiality, form, and spatial experience. Students will study their product’s shelf competitors and learn to communicate their observations through visual and spatial arguments rather than those that are explicitly verbal.

Working in cross-disciplinary teams, students will move continuously between research, drawing, modeling, and making. Weekly investigations will include physical and digital prototyping, dimensioning, 3-D modeling, and the design of experiences and environments that bring products into contact with consumers.

Each seminar will also include multimedia presentations on topics such as demographic and psychographic research, materiality, lighting and color perception, brand architecture, consumer rituals, product launch failures, creating brand touchpoints and environments, crafting visual arguments, and making an effective pitch. Case studies, readings, and guest perspectives will reflect contemporary emerging cultural, technological, economic, and creative conditions.

The semester will culminate in a final review before a cross-disciplinary jury drawn from architecture, design, business, technology, media, and other creative fields. The output will include full-scale physical prototypes supplemented by graphical data, renderings, digital animations, and spatial applications. Ultimately, the seminar asks students to consider the full breadth of architectural practice and the many scales at which their design skills can operate, from the object in the hand to the interior that surrounds it, and from material and atmosphere to economics, technology, culture, and media.