Smart Lighting for Fashion Store Windows

Smart light technology offers new dynamic and interactive capabilities that extend the potential of traditional lighting systems of attracting people and affecting their mood, emotions, and behavior. Our research explores smart lights in the context of shop windows. The paper describes an extensive empirical study that has been performed for 5 weeks in a top-level fashion store located in one of the trendiest and crowed shopping areas in Milan (Italy), where we installed a sophisticate smart lighting system and created three different light configurations (static, dynamic, and interactive). The goal of the study is to explore the shopping experience in front of the shop in these different experimental conditions. Users' data were gathered in three ways: i) automatic collection of data from over >300.000 people passing by or stopping in front of the shop windows of the store; ii) live observation of approximately 600 passers-by; iii) questionnaires submitted to 62 persons in front of the shop. Users' data provide empirical evidence that interactive smart lights have the potential to increase the attractiveness of shopping windows, fostering engagement in passers-by, and in general improve the shopping experience in the brick-and-mortar stores.