High schoolers band together to save the mall

The Future. A Boston-area mall tapped students from a local private school to see if they could come up with creative ideas to save the space from irrelevance in the age of e-commerce. The school’s entrepreneurship club eventually came back with some big swings that may not be totally feasible. But knowing that malls have historically been a staple suburban-teen hangout, turning to their counsel may soon provide a breakthrough for making the mall cool again.

Teen redesign
New England Innovation Academy’s entrepreneurship club is searching for a solution to save their local mall in Marlborough, Massachusetts, reports Fast Company.

• At the invitation of the management team at Solomon Pond Mall, the club made it their project to advise how best to revitalize the underperforming mall.
• Using NEIA’s focus on “human-centered design,” the club initially came back with more aesthetic updates like adding more seating areas and plants and updating lighting. Management didn’t love it, wanting more “big, more open ideas.”
• The club brought back more radical ideas like retrofitting vacant stores for more experiential things like VR arcades and immersive spas — management dug the ambition of these new proposals.

While Solomon Pond Mall probably won’t be taking all of the club’s ideas to heart, it shows that malls are thinking outside the box to stay alive — lest they become just another fulfillment warehouse.