James Woudhuysen offers some top tips on working with trends and forecasts
- Don’t compartmentalise people off from each other. Get forecasters, marketing people, distributors, customers, users and designers to think about the interaction between society, design, technology, competitors, distributors, markets and regulators.
- Collect but suspect forecasts based on technological determinism. Handle them sceptically and constructively.
- Get out there with customers and users - and those who aren't. Get out in the physical context of their purchase or use of design. Interview them, take pictures or videos of what they are doing with design and listen to what they say. At the same time, while inspired by users, refuse to become a slave to the claims they make. What they say may turn out to be little guide to what is really going on.
- Identify a trend then abstract out its extraneous aspects so as to concentrate on its essential features. To do this, tunnel down from the way the trend appears in everyday life in the present to its underlying dynamics. How the trend appears will often differ from the fundamental drivers behind it.
- Compare both historical and international examples and counter-examples of the trend. Ask yourself: why the similarities and differences? How have counter-trends modified trends in particular instances?
- Use only those parts of history that are relevant to the forecasting problem at hand. Do, however, check the history of the literature on the trend. How has the literature evolved over time, and what circumstances and events coloured it in any particular era? Where is it headed now, and what, if anything, can be learnt from it?
- Tunnel up from the heart of the trend to the way it appears in real life by developing a series of useful linking concepts. These concepts should allow you to reconstruct the present and anticipate the future of the trend.
- Think carefully about how fast your trend will pan out, and whether it is likely to interact with other trends you have isolated.
- Convert your forecasts into design opportunities and constraints. Then convert these into recommendations, as part of a design brief.
- Test your ideas in writing, as prototypes, among your peers, with Delphi panels and in action among customers, users and those who aren't. Rework your ideas accordingly.
...and four final factors to remember:
In futures research it is vital properly to balance up the elements of continuity and discontinuity that surround trends. Is the trend under discussion really new, or - as is often the case - is it just a more or less important new form of a previously underestimated but longstanding development? It is always a good idea to consider the history of a trend, and of ideas about a trend, before assessing the trend's likely evolution in the future.
You must also accurately estimate the timescales that surround trends. Just exactly when will a trend turn upwards or downwards? How long will it last?
When looking at different views about the future, you need to distinguish between the conventional wisdom of the media, or of the establishment, and the reality of what is developing on the ground. The two are not the same. More broadly, it makes sense to distinguish the subjective perception of change on the part of design users from objective changes - or the lack of them. For example, we all feel that technology breakthroughs come more and more frequently nowadays. But whether this feeling is always fully justified by the facts is debatable.
An obvious further challenge is to work out the direction and tempo of developments in different countries. We live in a more global world, and one where risks, in particular, appear to be global. In that case the relationship between trends that are universal, and those that apply only to particular countries or regions, needs very careful consideration. The hackneyed 1980s slogan ‘Think global, act local’ is no guide to the subtle analysis that’s required.