Stop thinking “shops”, start thinking “playground” – Beyond X Howard Saunders

One of the most exciting ideas from our evening with Howard Saunders was also one of the simplest:
Stop thinking “shop”. Start thinking “playground”.

For decades, the shopping-centre model has been remarkably consistent: create the right mix of stores, organise them effectively, drive footfall and encourage people to spend.

But as AI begins to transform how we discover, compare and buy products, that formula starts to look increasingly limiting.

If technology makes shopping progressively easier, faster and more personalised, physical retail has to offer something fundamentally different. That creates a much bigger opportunity for shopping-centre owners.

Think museum. Theatre. Gallery. Exhibition. Workshop. Event. Spectacle.

We can already see glimpses of this shift. Guinness is turning brand heritage into destination experiences. RH has transformed furniture retail into extraordinary galleries and hospitality environments. Louis Vuitton’s vast ship-shaped experience in Shanghai demonstrates how dramatically the boundaries between store, architecture, culture and entertainment are beginning to blur. Meow Wolf has built entire destinations around immersive, participatory worlds.

Even conventional retailers are beginning to think differently about space. Increasingly, the ambition isn’t simply to display more product, but to create richer reasons to visit, explore, linger, participate and return. That could have profound implications for shopping centres.

The opportunity is not simply to replace traditional retail units with leisure. It is to rethink what the asset itself can become.

Could an empty anchor store become an immersive cultural attraction? Could underused space become studios, workshops, performance venues or constantly changing exhibitions? Could brands occupy larger spaces temporarily, creating experiences that behave more like events than shops?

In that world, the traditional boundaries between retail, culture, hospitality and entertainment become increasingly irrelevant. Perhaps that is AI’s most interesting impact on physical retail.

As machines become better at helping us buy things, physical places have to become better at giving us something to do, feel, discover and remember.

So the question for shopping-centre owners is no longer simply:
“What shops should we put here?”

It is something far more exciting:
“What can people do here that they simply can’t do on a screen?