It’s What is on the Inside

As a Designer, part of my job is to know what is going on in design. That also means I am tasked with trend research on an annual basis. It’s helpful for a number of reasons but mostly it’s just used as a marketing tool to help products seem relevant.

I struggle with trend research. Actually, I mostly struggle with what it means to other people. A lot of the time (unless you are Pantone) trend research seems to lose or forget PEOPLE and BEHAVIOR. I mean, I consider design to be a very anthropological study that manifests itself in a profitable product that solves a problem and/or fills a need. (Holy crap that sounds pretentious when I read it back to myself even though it is a run on sentence, but… moving on…) I certainly love to create beautiful things, but beauty alone isn’t all that matters or makes a product successful. It’s what the product doesn’t always outwardly say. It’s what it does and how it interacts.

A friend of mine - whom I want to be like when I grow up - wrote a super keen article on Human Centered Design. It’s such a buzzword. It’s also such a miss in terms of it’s root goal as a principal. He points at what is lost when we forget the human at the center of the principal.

He says it so much better than I do, so I will link it for you here: https://medium.com/@mrettig/closing-the-people-gap-cd1759206ed1

But it got me to thinking about the looming task of a fall trend presentation (a task I have on my project list as I type this). It also made me realize how the research my team and I have done has gotten so shallow. Another thing that struck me was something a colleague said to me almost right after I read the article. He said, “I thought we didn’t create demand here.” Well that made me cringe a whole lot. I tried to defend the idea of creating demand by creating unique, meaningful product and sighted several good points that proved some success but it still made me sad. Generally, I feel like it is my responsibility to create products that help, bring joy, tell a story or support a set of personal values. Isn’t the whole point of innovation to create demand?!? Either that or fail? (I’ve failed many times and, for the record, I think it is almost more important than succeeding). I mean, I’m aware that sourcing hip and potentially profitable products that follow a trend is a very viable means of doing business, but if we did only that, why would I be here? Hm…

Hip trends are kind of like art. I mean that in the sense that they touch a person in a way that art does. We don’t always know why we need high wasted jeans, but we have to have them because they will make us feel hip… and relevant! Ultimately though, the very concept of beauty solves it’s own problem in it’s own innate way. If we only capture beauty in trend reporting, it seems unfair. It forgets about what matters. It isn’t a lead removing water filtration vessel or a cutting board for people with the use of only one hand. It neglects values. It neglects a story. It neglects the human at the end.

I hope to evolve my next report to keep these things in mind. So much is happening in the world at the moment which should not be ignored — especially when we step up to design and create more stuff. I have seen some reports do this but I know it’s not been enough to influence my own reporting until now.

What do you think is missing from many of the trend reports you have read or looked through? (Most of them have lots of very pretty pictures… we are visual thinkers after-all).