Park City Center Mall

Critique of Public Space

The public space I chose to visit was the local mall, Park City Center, in Lancaster. Whoever designed this mall was clearly not thinking of the average shopper, the speed shopper, or even a shopper who has a lot of time on their hands. This is one of the worst layouts of any building I have ever seen and that’s why I immediately chose it for this critique.

 

Online Directory: 

This is the map that is available on the malls website. Online, the designer did a great job at displaying the different sections of the mall by the use of color. The designer also used a legend to display where mall entrances, restrooms, customer service, ATM’s and mail offices are.  The directory and map online are visually easy to understand and interpret.

Mall Directory:

The design and layout of the mall directory itself is very easy to understand due to the individual decisions the designer made. Firstly, the designer used color to separate the different zones of the mall.

They also used a unified sans-serif font throughout the map that kept the store directory simple. The font size was only changed and made bold for the headings of the different categories of the store listings, to emphasize the category and make it stand out from all the store listings. 

Under each category there is a list of stores with a ZONE – (_). For example, lets say a shopper was looking for Sephora, they would browse the Health & Beauty category, and locate Sephora on the listing, for examples sake we will say Sephora is located at Zone - D.  Once the shopper locates the wing they are looking for, they can head to their destination. 

At the Mall: 

These directories are so hard to locate. I’ve only seen two haphazardly placed throughout the mall. Aside from the few directories located in random locations in the mall, there are no other visuals to guide the shopper through the building except for the Logos of the major brand department stores at the end of each major wing.

During the holiday times and quite often, they use the center of the building (where the wings meet) as a place to hold events. There are a few small coffee shops and food stands in this center as well, with chairs and tables scattered around the stands, which makes walking from wing to wing awkward and inconvenient.

The overall design of this building is not in anyway cohesive or united. The directories are not easy to locate and the wings of the buildings are not connected at the ends, which makes walking up and down each separate wing irritating and problematic for the shopper. There is also a wing that has stores that are only accessible through the outside of the building, which is also really inconvenient. I didn’t realize those outdoor stores existed until one day I parked in a different wing than usual. The only component of this place that makes sense and is easy to navigate due to road signs and signs for the different stores are the parking lots.

Areas of Improvement:

Some differences I would definitely make as a designer would be to add the directories to the online map, so users could easily locate them when they do enter the mall. Jacobsen writes, “The urban and architectural environment has also grown more perplexing; just finding our way around our built environment, a trivial task in the past, is now a distinct challenge. Thus the design of information and its efficient communication are more critical than ever (Information Design 84). So, I would also put a directory at the end of each wing of the mall, making them easy to find and close no matter what wing of the building you are in.

Another one of the issue with the layout of this mall is how all of the wings meet in the center circle where there are food stands, kiosks, and coffee stands with tables. As a designer I would create barriers between these areas to sit or purchase food so that shoppers could still easily maneuver through the center of the mall. Jacobsen writes, “as designers, we need to be conscious of, accept, and embrace the notion of unique perceptual abilities and respond generously to the needs it implies” (ID 128). 

The most major issue with the layout of this mall is not so much the signage or visual markers as it is with the actual accessibility and layout of the building itself. To better direct people where to go, I would recommend the above suggestions. However, taking it to another level, the actual building itself needs improvement in order for the building, the stores, and information in general inside this building to be as easily accessed as possible by its customers.

Something I think about every time I go to this mall is how I hate that every wing is a dead end. If the store I want to go to is all the way at the end of the wing, I have to walk all the way back up to the center and then turn the corner to a different wing and the process repeats itself. This may seem trivial but if there are 8 major wings of the building and two outside and you decide you want to go back and get that item you thought about, all the way down another wing, it's frustrating and certainly deters most people from actually going all the way back.

The simple graphic I created on Photoshop is supposed to represent all of the main entrances to the building being at the 4 major department store wings. I’d also include 4 other separate entrances between the 4 major department stores. From there, I would basically make a circle connecting the all the wings of the structure. This way, when the customer gets to the end of one wing, they can turn down the hall and walk up the next wing instead of going up and down. I would also leave the department stores separated from the hallway by also having their own entrances because if the circle was connected to the department stores, the customers would have to walk through the department stores to get to the desired wing, which wouldn’t help too much.