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Max studio.com e-commerce kiosks | |
The Max studio.com e-commerce kiosk is a freestanding computer station that is linked to the company's on-line shopping web site. Shoppers find these kiosks in shopping centers, airports, hair salons and Max studio.com stores. The kiosk is designed to allow shoppers to browse through Max studio.com merchandise and make immediate purchases that are shipped directly to their home. Although this can be accomplished from one's home computer, the kiosk is meant to provide a provocative introduction to this site through its sensuous, enigmatic design. The design was inspired by the idea of "luminescence" and the exploration and use of materials that would translate this theme into an appropriately mysterious evocation of the virtual world of the Web to which it is a portal. Translucent cast resin and fiberglass were chosen for a number of reasons: its cloudy light refraction, its tactile character which is at once both otherworldly and organic and surprisingly soft to the touch, and its extreme strength, durability, and ease of repair, which allows it to be placed in unsupervised locations. In a world where companies spend tremendous amounts of money distinguishing their product through association with rare or expensive materials, the Max studio.com kiosk elevates a common industrial material, "fiberglass", and exploits its "natural" qualities and limitations. The form of the kiosk was conceived as an "ideal" slab or monolith that has been folded to make a stable base and bent to defer to the site lines of the human body. The kiosk was designed to compliment the new Max studio.com store design in that it is understood as its inverse; an "object" rather than a "wrapper" that is lit from within rather than from the outside. The project is the result of a convergence of traditional and new media; creating a collaboration of architects, graphic designers, fashion designers, industrial fabricators and information technologists toward the creation of an object particular to the early twenty-first century.
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