ABSTRACT
In short, most consumer products are designed to create a feeling of dissatisfaction at the moment they are unwrapped for ‘consumption’.10 This means that our embodied relationship, or empathetic concern, for them in this state is difficult to sustain for more than the briefest moment. Up until now, the large and ever-increasing centralisation of our shopping malls has been necessary because we have yet to match their commercial effectiveness at a more modest, one-to-one level. This will probably change as interactive technologies learn to reproduce the marketing forces of the ‘mall’ and to redeploy them in virtual ‘home shopping’ zones that are targeted to individual predilections and incomes.
