An introduction to trends
Intuition will always remain vital to the design process, but professional research can often lead to surprising, counter-intuitive results. Done well, futures and trends research can help draw up design briefs that get to the heart of problems and avoid ‘me-too' solutions.
The market launch of a new product or service takes place months, and usually years, after its original conception and design. By that time, much will have changed: globalisation, politics, technology, state regulation, business and consumers will all take new forms. As the world appears to have become a more uncertain place, so early and expert research into future trends becomes more essential to the design process.
Market research is important to the design process, but tomorrow's new, often IT-based products and services are very hard to subject to market research. It's always a good idea to ask people whether they would like this or that new gadget or service, yet in many cases the answers people give are unlikely to be too revealing. People have very little experience of what they may encounter in the next few years. The investigation of future customer and user needs, and of future user requirements in terms of usefulness and usability, demands special resources.
On the other hand, research-led competence in future business models and technologies can independently lead managers to successful new products and services. In practice, research into the future requires balanced thinking about both the 'demand' and the 'supply' side.
Futures and trends research is an enterprise more difficult, more professional and less speculative than 'futurology'. It aims to rise above impressionistic assumptions about the future - assumptions that are frequently derived from popular media. Futures and trends research refuses to confine itself to 'consumer' issues, or even to needs. Even the future of consumer users of design is strongly determined by their experience of work - as well as by their interaction with retailers, urban planners, state regulators and other forces. Moreover people are not just needy customers, consumers or users: they also have distinct and varied talents as producers. Their capability to change the world, and not just use it up, must be taken into account.
While trying to avoid stodgy compromises in its pragmatic conclusions, futures and trends research should also try to avoid making extreme or lurid verdicts on the future. It balances the elements of continuity with those of change. Because it recognises that the future lies in our hands, futures and trends research also avoids the exaggerated sense of foreboding that often surrounds issues such as terrorism, crime prevention or sustainability.
Anyone performing futures and trends research must adopt a systematic, numerate and critical approach to other practitioners' futures and trends research. To do research successfully is constantly to acknowledge and question one's assumptions, to test them, and to be prepared to revise them in the light of events. It is also to accept that in general forecasts have tended to tell us more about the contemporary obsessions, fears and prejudices of the forecaster than they have about the realities of what was going to happen.
Naturally, in the world of design, futures and trends research must have strong observational and visual components to it. However, to confine such research to the world of visible behaviour, artefacts or screen displays is to fail to meet the rigorous analytical standards that are required. Futures and trends research must be conducted using a variety of media: images need to be combined with statistics, charts, diagrams, quotations and incisive recommendations about what to do – and how and when to do it.
Futures and trends research relies on a number of established disciplines. These include:
- Technology forecasting: technologists are sometimes reasonably - if unjustifiably - confident about how and when different technologies will emerge and how fast they will be adopted. A number of industry institutions have firm views, backed up with quantitative data, on emerging trends in IT, biotechnology, energy, defence and so on.
- Socio-economic forecasting: trends in ageing, fertility, family, housing and wealth are the subject of many Government and semi-official reports.
- Market forecasting: firms in the marketing world issue regular reports on the future of business and consumer markets, typically forecasting sales, market shares and channels to market.
- Delphi panels: named after the celebrated oracle of ancient Greece, these are panels of specialists who are polled for their opinions on when, how and to what extent future developments will take place.
- Scenario planning: thinking about the future by developing stories about several possible versions of it. Scenarios allow situations to be recognised quickly, and prepared responses to be deployed quickly too. They are best revisited regularly.
- Ethnography: literally, the study of human culture through its artefacts, customs and rituals. In design, a term applied - rather too broadly - to understanding tomorrow's latent needs through the direct, often user-assisted capture of today's lifestyles and contexts of use. Methods of capture include:
a) Asking people questions and listening to their replies while they use design
b) Still or video photography of behaviour with different products and different settings
c) Users making camera journals of their actions
d) Users making drawings of the ways they conceive of their relations to things and other people.
Over the coming years, trends and futures research itself is likely to grow, as perceptions of uncertainty prompt more interest in the future. Already, in the wake of terrorist attacks, there is a revival of scenario planning among government and top management.
Altogether, the feeling will grow that if you aren't very professional in forecasting, you'll fall victim to a rival that is just that – or simply to events. And the feeling will be right.
Many forecasters, however, feel too humble to outwit what they regard as 'fickle fate'. Many repeat that great scientists and technologists never foresaw the long-term uses to which their ideas were eventually put. Only by making informed predictions can we learn where our predictions turn out to be wrong. And only through these mistakes can we learn how to make better predictions.