The Concept Book: A New, Methodological Approach to Interdisciplinary Retail Design

The design process is becoming more increasingly complex and multidisciplinary. In the 1970s, researchers studied the confluence of design’s functional, symbolic, and technical elements. Later, research expanded to include the spatial dimension and design’s role within the Experience Economy (first theorized by Pine and Gilmore and more recently by Prahalad and Ramaswamy). Today, the study of design as a “complex systematic entity” requires new methodologies and instruments through which it is possible to develop the design activity, assuming a language that is common to the involved disciplines. This premise introduces the importance of the concept book, which originates from retail design and involves a visual interpretation of the brand identity. The objective of the concept book is to express a motivated philosophy of a project’s goals, to use a mainly visual language with keywords, and to exclude the use of common executive technical skills. It is a descriptive handbook that is developed to share the evolution of the design process with appropriate stakeholders. This paper describes this new instrument by analyzing case studies.