Need to Know
24 : 08 : 18

Barcelona – Designer Andrés Reisinger has created a series of digital retail concepts that transform the store into a meditative environment.

The digital image series, Plastic Rain, is complemented with ideas of how customers should experience each room. In one environment, Reisinger proposes that visitors leave their shoes in box in order to feel the long hair carpet against their feet. The images utilise 3D tools to bring sensuous textures to life, including balloons, liquid, material fringing and thick carpets.

Reisinger uses digital art and surrealism to envisage how our retail spaces would look without architectural limitations. Retailers must consider how they can embed tactility and sensory experiences in their physical stores, prioritising inspiration over sales per square foot.

San Francisco – The Hong Kong-based company has opened its first US location, allowing chefs to effortlessly book kitchen and café space.

BiteUnite is a multi-use space that allows food entrepreneurs to book a fully-equipped kitchen and commercial space to publicise their offerings to customers, something that can be hard to achieve without funding. By connecting chefs with customers, they can gain real feedback and fast-track the process of starting a culinary business.

An accompanying online platform makes the booking process seamless, where they can make selections to personalise their space such as having a communal table for cooking classes or 24-hour access to the kitchen for baking.

The food and drink sector is increasingly drawing inspiration from Silicon Valley and creating incubators to foster collaboration in the kitchen. For more, read our Edible Incubators microtrend.

US – The dating platform is launching Tinder U, a version of the app that connects nearby college students.

Accessible through the Tinder app, users must sign up with a .edu email address and be geo-located on campus to be certified. They can then swipe as normal, but only from a pool of other college students at nearby schools.

According to Tinder, the feature will make it easier for students to make new friends and study buddies as well as romantic partners when they move to a new city, which often can be an alienating experience. While the UX is much like regular Tinder, the student’s university badge displays on their profile image.

By providing an exclusive space for college students, Tinder U is a similar concept to the original version of Facebook. For more on how consumer attitudes towards dating are changing, and how apps must keep up, read our Opinion piece Is Instagram really a dating app?

YouGov recently conducted the biggest UK study ever commissioned on attitudes towards death and bereavement on behalf of Co-op. With responses from 30,000 people, the study focused on death as a taboo subject, finding that almost 18 million people are uncomfortable talking about it.

The study also found that 93% of women have considered their own morality, a slightly higher number than men (91%). It also drew comparisons between the taboo around talking about death and people’s failure to plan ahead – 81% of people have not saved anything towards a funeral and only 27% have written a will.

In July, funeral company Funeralbooker, which eases the process of making funeral plans, rebranded as Beyond with a contemporary identity in order to encourage conversations around death that don’t revolve around sympathy.