Mobzilla Botany Town

The shop is a mobile accessory retail store in East Auckland. The store was designed to have a futuristic feel, drawing inspiration from our innate desire for nature and digital invention “Tetris” influenced in the 1980s. It aims to combine the digitalised graphical elements with a more natural feeling, coexisting in a tranquil and clean balanced state. Both seem to share some characteristics, in terms of creative expression, using digitalised shapes and bold colours that are reminiscent of nature. We conceptualised the store like a courtyard garden with tall hedges forming the boarders, centralised white flower gardens, and a series of laneways. Similar to digital graphics, this ‘abstract’ layout is mapped out using a 50cm x50cm pixel module system and rotated on a 45dgrees angle. It offers a flexible design framework which can be adaptive, scalable and repeatable and applied to various forms and configurations. The store blends traditional retail design with a fun, digital aesthetics twist. The vibrant “Tetris-like” interior space can be viewed from the street through two giant iPhone-like windows which sits on a mosaic tiled plinth conceived as the iPhone stand. The shopfront entrance is made out of full height clear glass doors, aiming to eliminate the boundary between the world of physical and the world of digital The interior space was also employed using in a singular material palette inspired by the garden “green”, opting for a bright avocado green colour covering both walls and other surfaces, creating a dialogue between product and buyers and aiming at building a closer relationship between digital and life. To complement the “green” environment, various pixel patterns were also created in varying shapes and sizes across the flooring and walls to give a feeling that everything is moulded in the same material. The wall shelving displays a “tall green hedge" forming pixelated zigzagging borders that envelops customers when they enter; the central display, a “white flower zone” stacked in 50x50 white pixel blocks in various configurations, ensures accessibility for the customers while achieving a visually pleasing digital pattern to the space. On the side of the white flower zone, there is a reception counter made out of 50x50 stacked LED light blocks as a “garden statue” to light the space. The suspended ceiling lighting tubes above the “centralised white flower garden zone“, following a zigzag pixel module pattern, are intended to be perceived as beams of light through clouds & trees. Bold colour and Tetris-like digital graphics are at the heart of the perception for this project’s playful interior. A bright green colour palette is found throughout the store as a remittance of nature. These designs might not be wholly pragmatic, but are architectural experimentations, exploring the limits of architectural identities, playing with pixel modules and associations of materials and colours. The space is fun and futuristic but at the same time vitalizing and somehow surprising, which can also be repeated and adapted for future reconfiguration. It has successfully merged the world of digital and the world of nature, attempting to create the next generation for the mobile accessory retail design.