The Instagrammability Hype in Design

Designers Create Instagrammable Places for Hotels, Retail and Gastronomy

Instagrammability is the new marketing trend for companies in the hotel, restaurant and retail industries. The competition for Instagram followers to like the company’s content is fierce, so companies are increasingly turning to so-called Instagrammable places for their design-oriented customers. Instagrammability describes the ideal scenery for a perfect Instagram picture. Hotel brochures already advertise photogenic locations and ideal backdrops, and restaurants and bars also know about an extraordinary interior and photo-worthy lighting for successful social media marketing. In the best case, the design and architecture of such Instagram-friendly arrangements encourage visitors to share their own photos of them and thus automatically make the company better known in the Instagram world. And it’s a big one: more than a billion people are active on Instagram worldwide, and 15 million in Germany.

Internationally, an Instagram wall for hospitality architecture projects is already standard. There is even already a special Instagram design guide on the market, published by an Australian architecture studio. The guide gives businesses comprehensive tips for higher Instagrammability, i.e. how to design an Instagram-ready environment: “Providing your guests with a visual sense of amazement, creativity and fun from the moment they step into your space, is the best way to set yourself apart from your competitors on social media.”

So not only does Instagram influence our perception of design, but the platform’s influence extends beyond digital boundaries. Companies no longer only use Instagram to present their own image content, but hotels, restaurants or shop concepts are specifically aligned according to Instagrammability criteria. Eye-catching flooring in hotel lobbies, funky lettering on room walls, photo-ready lighting in restaurants and perfectly coordinated colour concepts in cafés serve as perfect backdrops for their visual dissemination by like-hungry followers on Instagram.

Instagrammable place in Munich’s Forum Schwanthalerhöhe: the “Dancing Mirrors” installation (design: Sebastian Hepting) by design studio Ingo Maurer

Corporate marketing on Instagram must therefore also be viewed from the “analogue” perspective. To strengthen their Instagrammability, social media-savvy companies are increasingly relying on the support of object designers and interior architects.

A current example of the successful design of an impressive Instagrammable place is the installation of a pendulum wave in the newly opened Munich shopping district “Forum Schwanthalerhöhe”. With “Dancing Mirrors” (design: Sebastian Hepting), the renowned design studio Ingo Maurer has created a very photogenic eye-catcher within the hustle and bustle of the shops: 24 thread pendulums in a 17-metre-long row swing sometimes as a closed line, sometimes in snake and wave patterns and increase in their movements to a veritable dance with seemingly predetermined formation.

Instagrammable places_Ingo Maurer_hicklvesting

Instagrammable pendulum lights design hicklvesting Ingo Maurer

The choreography of the pendulums, however, is bound by the laws of nature. Visitors to the shopping centre are offered a kinetic experience that, in interaction with the multiple reflections of the silver pendulum surfaces, is intended not only to encourage them to pause, but also to take photographs and films. And the Instagrammability of this place seems to be convincing, as first Instagram posts with the hashtags #pendelwelle or #forumschwanthalerhöhe show. Pictures of the installation are posted as a special eye-catcher — and the shopping centre as a company gets the desired attention quite incidentally.