2022
_a_POD
A 24/7 plug and play store.
A fully autonomous convenience store.
a_POD was designed to create a better experience for shoppers. Through technology is now possible to add items to shoppers’ virtual baskets when picked. This pod is adaptable to any business, any scenario. Walk in, pick up your goods and leave. Simple as that. Anywhere, anytime. A seamless shopping experience.
Strategy || Product || Experience
This adventure started with a very short and minimalistic brief, design an awesome store in a box.
Sensei approached us with the goal to design a new retail experience: an autonomous store, that could be easily deployed anywhere. Plus, it needed to be scalable to different sizes and fully customizable to any brand.
Design hand in hand with engineering, in an intense iterative process.
Our design team approached this project as a R&D endeavour. Both teams, design and engineering, worked side by side in order to evolve the project in parallel, allowing it to culminate in an object that ensured two realities: technological efficiency and functional usability. Different versions of the a_POD were created and tested in order to accomplish the best form factor.
Zero friction. Seamless experience. Enter, pick, exit.
An equipment like this has a lot of technology involved, from computer vision, hardware and software, data centers and others. All this technology needed to be inside the pod, and hidden from the user, allowing an experience with zero friction. The space available at the edges and on the ceiling was reserved for storing various equipment, not only technological equipment, but also ventilation and air conditioning.
Different businesses, different needs, different sizes, different uses, different a_POD’s.
The a_POD was designed to be modular, so it has different configurations. This way it can be adapted to specific needs of specific clients, and to the context of implementation. The interior needed also to be modular, since some clients would want only to have linear shelves, and other could want to alternate the shelves with refrigerated modules. To increase the revenue streams, the edges can be modified to provide different functions through external equipments such as smart lockers, ledwalls, ticket kiosks, and so on.
The first autonomous, play-and-play store in Europe, was designed by INNGAGE, produced by Sensei, and is being managed by Galp Energia.
