Informal learning and shopping?

We just finished this workshop on interactive retail spaces where we shared our experience at the University of Arizona Science Center. What does a workshop on interactive retail spaces have to do with informal learning? Well, the answer is: a lot. How many times have you shopped and learned at the same time? Have you ever gone to a Best Buy just to see what is possible or to test and see a new product? The problem is that today’s retail environments don’t see what customers really do today when they buy. According to Pew, 39% of US people used the Internet in 2008 to research products (cell phones). 10% claimed that their research had a major influence on their final purchase decision.

As we all know well, there are several classes of products that we would buy only after seeing and touching them; at the same time, when we are at the store, we often wish we could go back online to find out more about what is in front of us. Unfortunately, retailers seem to ignore this basic truth of 21st century shopping: it is not about online OR brick & mortar, is about BOTH. Sure, most B&M retailers have built their e-commerce site where customers can buy their products, but this is not what customers really want. Customers want to experience shopping online AND offline seamlessly, holistically. They want to be able to research the products they are interested in online, visit the store and carry with them the Trails (results) of their research, try out and touch some of the products they already researched and discover new ones, go back home and review what they did in the store and continue their research online again… until they finally buy!

I don’t think anybody can reasonably claim that this not “learning”. Let me go back to the original question of this blog, then. The shopping experience I just described, it seems to me, is very similar to the very one we designed for the University of Arizona Science Center: visitors interact with amazing exhibits powered by Zonebee and Tinker.it (Arduino) and – when they go home – they can use Zonebee to review their Science Center Trails online and learn more on the Web, sharing their experience with other friends on Facebook or Ning. Some people call all this Informal Learning, other call it Microlearning… What we found out it that existing tools one the Web and IRL (In Real Life) are totally inadequate to support these everyday’s activities that people perform when they work, shop, study, or make decisions about our health. All these activities span across time and geography, are often short in duration but recurrent over longer periods of time, online and in physical spaces like museums, libraries, trade shows and, yes, shopping malls. We designed Zonebee to support these activities: a meta-Web application that helps users to be in control of their learning online and, like in the Science Center, In Real Life.