Week 8 - Jayde Farmer - Downtown Disney - Site Specific

 

I choose Downtown Disney for my site specific blog post. I'm fairly familiar with Downtown Disney, especially at Christmas time, but focusing on the lighting allowed me to see the was in which the designers tried to shape the environment to be "Disney"-like. I think that the designers were trying to elevate the traditional strip-mall feeling to make it more magical. There were a lot of colorful lights on the trees, not just in Christmas colors but rainbows that parallel the colors in the "World of Disney" store. The Christmas trees and lights added to this, but some of the silver pods of decorations with cool toned lights didn't really match the existing colorful lighting. 

The first store I went in was the Star Wars Trading Outpost. I've had issues with this store's design since it opened, but seeing the lighting at night just emphasized them even more. It used to be a Rainforest Cafe, which is still very obvious. I think the designers were trying to emulate some kind of space trading outpost. They really just dressed the existing building with a bunch of wires and camo netting so that they could sell more Star Wars stuff. The lighting inside and outside the store makes it worse. On the outside they have a giant white flood light that looks like a construction work light pointed at the camo netting and wire, washing out any of the texture that it would have added. The only redeeming feature is the light in the topmost tower and the side that carve out the architecture, but the warm glow is obviously something from when it was a rainforest cafe, because it doesn't match any of the lighting in the rest of the store. Inside, there are warmer lights that showcase the merchandise,  with cooler fill lights that come from right above the poorly dressed plastic trees, highlighting the camo netting and the laziness of the redesign.

The most successful lighting I noticed was the Disney Home store, because it is so simple. The designers wanted you to feel at home in the Disney Home store. The Home store is lit with a warmer halogen-reminiscent style. This is very obvious against the cooler-lit gallery next door. I think that this warm and inviting look was a great choice for a home store. It made the display of objects look like they could be in your home, rather than being on a display. This helped relate the items to the home and made it comfortable to browse for a long time.