Interactive Window Installation Helps Advertise Retail Space

It can be a hell of a challenge for retail space owners to find tentants these days as many cities around the world are facing rising numbers of shop vacancies due to struggling economies and changing shopping habits. Interaction designer Niklas Roy came up with a brilliant attention-grabbing installation to help advertise an empty shop space in Sherbrooke, Canada.

“Sherbrooke’s downtown has many abandoned shop fronts. My installation was set up in one of them. And as nobody likes to stroll in roads with empty shop windows, I wanted to do this retail space a favor and help it to find a new tenant who can care about it”, explains Roy. His ‘À Louer/For Rent’ shop front installation makes use of a surveillance camera to track pedestrians and moves the ‘À LOUER’ sign right in front of them. The sign follows the passers-by as long as they walk in front of the shop window. See how it works:

Niklas Roy’s installation is an interesting take on marketing vacant space that nicely adds to our earlier writings on revitalization of high streets — a topic that’s been keeping us busy for a while. Earlier this year we spotted a trend of new hybrid online-offline shopping concepts that are popping up in cities around the globe, such as QR stores and online stores that open a real-life shop because they need physical space any way.