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Why can't we get trends right?

By Rain Noe - March 28, 2008

in Object Culture

Debate time: Why are we so often wrong about the way new products and services will affect our lives? TV, said radioheads, would kill our imaginations. The VCR and the DVD, said movie studios, would kill their business. The ubiquity of computers was supposed to bring us paperless offices.

The latest mistaken prediction was that the internet--a simple way of sending electronic correspondence--would precipitate a sharp decline in snail mail. Of course, just the opposite has happened. Postal markets worldwide are continuing to grow. Germany, one of the largest European mail markets, saw increased overall volume of one billion pieces from 2003 to 2006. New Zealand's mail spike has been directly linked to the internet. In America alone, eBay is responsible for an estimated 1 billion packages a year that wouldn't have been sent when people couldn't see the contents of your attic online; Netflix has been shipping 2 million movies a day since at least 2005; and most of us are now getting a paper bill in the mail we didn't get 20 years ago, the DSL bill.

Which is not to say we're always wrong: the telephone did in fact lead to a decline in personal, handwritten letters, cell phones make us drive like jerks, and the music business is most definitely dying. (That latter fact, however, may have less to do with MP3s and more to do with the fact that most new music, well, sucks.) But we're not putting this entry up so we can pat ourselves on the back for correct predictions--we're interested in what makes us wrong. How can we, as product designers, look past the obvious and truly understand what global trends will really mean to us as end-users?

Suggestions please!

Sources: 1, 2, 3

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Berae McClary

16 years ago

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Good research is key. Anyone can speculate, but properly designed research gives insight into actual behavior.
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trendoffice

16 years ago

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I think that it is mainly the extreme predictions that are not successful. Also, in order to make any trend-forcasting one has to have made his/her homework - research, analysis, long time of observation and enough experience.
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nick gogerty

16 years ago

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hire anthropologists to understand how technology will be used to meet core needs of the human animal: sex, communication, social signaling, group inclusion, group exlusion etc.
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jay

16 years ago

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Those predictions don't sound like predictions designers would make, they sound like predictions an engineer or an business person would make, they are short term predictions based on the now and the past, they are based upon cost, risk, and old methods of doing business, they are not based on understanding the entire experience.

I worked closely with engineers for awhile, and there motto was pretty easy, always design and engineer for the worst case scenario. So in the engineers head, it's ingrained in there psyche for quite a few valid reasons, to think of the worst.

Further more it's a well known fact that most people have trouble being creative and really struggle when it comes to envisioning the future, it's always a utopian world or a world based on past reflective memory, they find it hard to think about the grey and it's in the grey where we as designers should sit, not at the forest level or at the tree level but in between.

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Ethan

16 years ago

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Personally, I think that our collective inability to predict trends stems from the same reason we can't really predict any aspect of the future too well; anything that works as predicted is not going to change the way we think, because it is really just affirming a pre-conceived notion. But take a product like the iPod, which totally changed our perceptions on how we'd consume music, and it stands out. People study why it was so amazing, why it was such a hit, and then try to replicate that paradigm. But, if you take a product that has done a solid business but not really revolutionized anything, it just stands as another marker to the current way of thinking. We then shrug our shoulders and try to figure out how something is going to actually change our lives.
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Bob Hobbs

16 years ago

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Because designing the product is not really connected with designing its effects. When you design something, you're concerned with (a) the object itself, as a personal expression; and (b) how many people will pay for it.

But when the product gets into the wild, its life is a lot richer and more complex than (b) takes into account.

Say you just invented the mobile phone-- you know it'll sell because people already use payphones, but beyond that it's not worth your while to wonder exactly how it will affect daily life.

For example, you might think, "this will totally change the social significance of not answering the phone," so maybe you decide that callers won't be able to tell if you're screening, out of range, or in a call.

Except you'd be wrong to make that decision so early, because the more narrowly you plan, the harder it will be to hit the target. It'd be a waste of energy.

I think designers can predict trends OK--wise ones just don't make bets on their predictions.
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brad

16 years ago

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I think part of it boils down to separation, a "forest/trees" scenario. We have the end user in mind whenever we design anything, but we're thinking as designers, not as the end user. Not to mention that if we spend any considerable amount of time creating products for one medium we become deeply involved in that medium. And when a newer medium appears we often don't want to let go of the work we put so much of ourselves into already. The real key is to remember that there is no such thing as "trend forecasting". We're not fortune tellers, and no one knows what the future will hold, or how it will be perceived by humanity as a whole. All we need to do is create design that is versatile and timeless (easier said than done), and then we can transcend any single medium. If you manage to figure out how to do that, give me a call; I could use that kind of job security.
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Carl Alviani

16 years ago

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Maybe because we're trying to be too *creative* in our prediction techniques, and end up projecting what we'd like to see happen in the future, rather than what's actually likely. The quote on futurism is still William Gibson's gem: "The future's already out there, it's just not evenly distributed." Maybe we should spend more time finding out what people are doing now before we try and predict next steps.
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Jason

16 years ago

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Its actually really simple. Its called "adaptation" Businesses and services adapt to competition everyday.
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asango

16 years ago

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currently reading the black swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

some interesting concepts so far...
most change has little to do with trends and more to do with randomness/unique events...

http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400063515/nassimtalebsfavo/002-8533486-7104820

ultimately we (esp. designers) tend to think we know more or have more insight/awareness than we really do.
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cyclopsebunny

16 years ago

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A wise man (William Fogler) once said, "You can't tell people what to do, only how to do it".

We (product designers) deal in a world of "How" not "What". So when you define a world based on "How", you can't assume or predict "What".

The internet is a "How", "What" is left to the users. Computers are great for "how" to store electronic documentation, communication, and storage... It is the users who decide to print everything they read, store and mail.

If a designer were to define the "Who", "How", "Where" and "Why" to force a "What"... the people would rise up and kill the designer. "What" makes us free. "What" is creativity.

We should not be in the job of "What".
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