Non-Obvious 2019- How To Predict Trends and Win The Future Read online

  This is the phase of the process where I find discipline. It forces me to go back and either do more research and sometimes even change the original concept of the trend to be broader or narrower.

  Grading all the past identified trends (see Appendix) was eye opening when my team and I first decided to add it in the 2016 edition of the book. It was clear that the trends where we had more discipline in the proving phase were the ones that fared better over time. Those were the best ideas, and the ones that you can and should aspire to have, too.

  Tips & Tricks: How to Prove Your Trend Ideas

  Focus on Diversity. One of the biggest mistakes people make in trend curation is only seeking out examples in a single industry, category, or situation. If a trend is going to have a large impact on how business is done or how consumers behave, it should be supported by examples or cases in other industries.

  Watch Your Biases. Nothing will cloud your judgment more quickly than finding a trend that somehow helps your own industry, product, or career. This is a tricky subject because part of the intention of curating your own trends may specifically be to support a product or belief. Yet it’s also where many of the trends that are oversimplified or just plain wrong come from. Non-obvious trends don’t have apparent industry biases and are not gratuitously self-serving.

  Use Authoritative Sources. When it comes to the examples and research that you find to support a trend, the more authoritative sources you can find, the better. What this means in practice is using examples that people may recognize or finding research from reputable organizations or academic institutions. These sources can make the difference between selling your vision or having your audience question your conclusions because they don’t believe your sources.

  Let’s bring the five elements of the Haystack Method to life through a step-by-step analysis of how the process helped define a trend from one of the past reports.

  The following description takes you through all five steps of the Haystack Method to gather, aggregate, elevate, name, and prove a single trend from the 2015 Non-Obvious Trend Report: “Engineered Addiction.”

  Case Study: Engineered Addiction

  How to Curate a Non-Obvious Trend

  STEP 1—Gathering

  One of the earliest stories I saved, more than a year before this trend was published, was about Dong Nguyen, the creator of mobile game Flappy Bird, which became one of the most downloaded apps of the year in 2013. After millions of downloads, Nguyen suddenly removed the game from the iTunes and Android stores. In the interview I had saved, he shared how his unusual move had fueled a consuming worry that the game was negatively affecting people’s lives because it had become “addictive.”

  His unexpected choice seemed significant—though I wasn’t yet sure exactly why—so I saved it. Months later, I read a book called Hooked, by Nir Eyal, which explored how Silicon Valley product designers were increasingly building “habit-forming products” that seemed to describe perfectly what Nguyen had unintentionally done (and felt so guilty about). I saved that idea, too.

  STEP 2—Aggregating

  At the end of that year, I began the process of aggregating ideas to start to identify trends. This was the moment where I started seeing a pattern in examples that seemed to focus on some type of addictive behavior. The Flappy Bird story was about game design that seemed to lead to addiction. The book Hooked was about product design and using it to create addictive habits in people. As I grouped these ideas together, I focused on the role that interface design seemed to be playing in creating all these addictive experiences. I stapled these stories together and put an index card on top, where I wrote the words “Addictive Design” with a black Sharpie. It was a guess about what I thought the trend could be.

  STEP 3—Elevating

  When I stepped back to look through my initial list of possible trend ideas (which usually numbers about seventy-five once I make it through the first two phases of the Haystack Method), there were several other trend concepts that seemed to possibly be related to this idea of Addictive Design.

  One of them was a grouping of stories that were all about the use of gamification techniques to help people of all ages learn new skills. For that group, I had an index card on top that said “Gamified Learning,” and inside were stories about the Khan Academy using badges to inspire learning and a startup called Curious that was making learning addictive by creating bite-sized pieces of learning on interesting topics.

  Another group of ideas was inspired by a book I had read earlier that year called Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss, which had focused on the idea of addiction related to food. The book exposed how snack foods, such as Oreos and Cheetos, had been created to offer a “bliss point” that mimicked the sensations of addiction in most people.[11] Along with the book, I also had several other articles with similar themes that were grouped together and stapled with an index card that said “Irresistible Food.”

  In this third phase of elevation, I realized that what seemed like three unique ideas (Gamified Learning, Addictive Design, and Irresistible Food), might actually be elements of a single trend. This broader idea seemed to describe a growing instance where experiences and products of multiple types were increasingly being created to be intentionally addictive.

  I put all the stories for each of these three aggregated concepts together and called the elevated grouping “Ubiquitous Addiction.”

  STEP 4—Naming

  Now that I had examples as disparate as food manufacturing and online learning, it was time to pick a name that would effectively describe this trend. I had already come up with several to consider. As I reviewed, I dismissed “Addictive Design,” because it was too small and didn’t describe the food related examples. “Gamified Learning” was also tossed aside as too obvious and niche. The elevated name I had later defined of “Ubiquitous Addiction,” also didn’t exactly roll off the tongue and seemed to imply that more people are getting addicted to things than in the past, which I didn’t believe properly described the trend.

  None of the earlier names worked and I knew I needed something better.

  The final clue as to what the name of the trend could be came from another interview article I read featuring Nir Eyal. In the article, he described himself as a “behavioral engineer.” This idea of “engineering” instead of just design immediately seemed far better suited to describing what I felt the trend was.

  After testing a few versions of using the word “engineering” in the title of the trend, I settled on “Engineered Addiction” as the most descriptive and memorable way to describe this trend and all of its components.

  STEP 5—Proving

  Once the name was in place, I had a way to talk about and share the trend to test it further. I already knew that I had stories across multiple industries and the trend had several dimensions. To get even more proof, I sought out more examples and research focused on intentionally addictive products and experiences that had been “engineered.”

  My research led me to a recently published Harvard study showing why social media had become so addictive for so many, and then later to a body of research from a noted MIT anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, who spent more than fifteen years doing field research on slot machine design in Las Vegas.[12]

  Her book, Addiction by Design, exposed the many ways that casinos use the experience and design of slot machines to encourage addictive behavior.

  Together, these were the final elements of proof that would help me tell this story completely.

  Engineered Addiction made my 2015 Non-Obvious Trend Report, and, ultimately, it became one of the most talked about trends that year.

  Avoiding Future Babble

  Now that we have gone through the process for curating trends, I want to share a final caution: the dangerous potential for much of trend forecasting to sink into nonsense.

  Despite my love of trends and belief that any of us can learn to curate them, the fact remains that we live in a world frustrated
with predictions, and for good reason.

  Economists fail to predict activities that lead to global recessions. Television meteorologists predict rain that never comes. And business trend forecasters are perhaps the worst offenders, sharing glassy-eyed predictions that seem either glaringly obvious or naively impossible.

  In 2011 journalist Dan Gardner wrote about this mistake-ridden obsession with the future in his insightful book Future Babble. Gardner illuminated the many ways that so-called experts and pundits have led us down mistaken paths and caused more harm than good.

  He builds his argument based on the widely known but rarely heeded research of psychologist Philip Tetlock, who spent more than twenty years interviewing all types of experts and collected of their 27,450 predictions and ideas about the future. Tetlock then analyzed these predictions against verifiable data and found that the experts’ predictions were no more accurate than random guesses.[13]

  When Tetlock confronted some of these experts on how flawed their predictions had been, he found that the experts who had fared worst were the ones who struggled with uncertainty. These “hedgehogs,” as Tetlock describes them, were overconfident, described their mistaken predictions often as being “almost right,” and generally had an unchanging worldview.

  “At least 50% of pundits seem wrong all the time.

  It’s just hard to tell which 50%.”

  Dan Gardner (from Future Babble)

  On the other side were experts who didn’t follow a set path. They were comfortable with being uncertain and accepted that some of their predictions could be wrong. These experts are “foxes” and their defining characteristics included modesty about their ability to predict the future and a willingness to express doubt about their predictions.

  How can you tell which predictions to trust and which to discount? And how can you improve the accuracy of your own predictions?

  The Art of Getting Trends Right (and Wrong)

  I shared Dan Gardner’s caution about the dangers of false certainty and skepticism about future predictions for a reason. If you are going to build your ability to curate trends, you must also embrace the idea that sometimes you will be wrong.

  In Part IV, you will see a summary of previous trends along with a corresponding letter grade and a retrospective analysis of its longevity.

  Some of them are embarrassingly off the mark.

  The reason I share them candidly anyway is partly to illustrate Gardner’s point. I want to be as honest with you as I try to be with myself and my team after each year’s report. Foxes, after all, are comfortable with uncertainty and know they may sometimes be wrong. I know I’m sometimes wrong, and I guarantee that you will be, too.

  Why write a book about predicting the trends and describe the entire process if we both might be wrong at the end of it? A fear of failure should not hold you back from applying your best thinking and exploring big ideas. More important, the Haystack Method may be a way to curate trends, but it’s also

  a way to think about the world that involves finding more intersections and avoiding narrow-minded thinking.

  Learning to predict the future, in other words, has a valuable side effect: it can make you more curious, observant, and understanding of the world around you. It’s this mental shift that may ultimately be the greatest benefit of learning to see and curate trends.

  Oscar Wilde wrote that “to expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.”[14] Non-Obvious is about helping you to build this type of modern intellect through noticing the things that others miss, thinking differently, and curating ideas to describe the accelerating present in new and unique ways.

  Now that we’ve achieved that, let’s turn our attention to the trends for this year.

  04

  Strategic Spectacle

  What’s the Trend?

  Brands and creators intentionally

  use spectacles to capture attention

  and drive engagement.

  The most controversial rocket launch of the past decade took place on January 21, 2018, from a comparatively tiny launchpad in New Zealand.

  After days of weather delays, a U.S.-based aeronautics company called Rocket Lab finally launched a long-awaited test flight for their newest rocket: the Electron. Although the company had originally announced the rocket was carrying three small commercial satellites, days after the successful launch, its CEO Peter Beck came clean. There was a fourth passenger on the Electron: a 3-foot-tall, 23-pound spherical satellite covered with 76 reflective panels designed to reflect sunlight back to Earth. The Humanity Star[1], as Beck called it, promised to be “the brightest thing in the night sky.” Beck did not put it into orbit to fulfill some deep scientific purpose. He simply did it “to get people to look up.”

  The response was swift and harsh.

  Some scientists immediately decried Beck’s move, calling the Humanity Star their worst fear, an example of light pollution and space graffiti. Others compared it to putting a disco ball in space. Many questioned whether it was ethical to place this performance-art-installation-meets-clever-marketing thing into the night sky–a domain belonging to no one, and unavoidable by everyone.

  The controversy, though, died down quickly as the satellite fell out of orbit earlier than planned and burned in the atmosphere upon reentry, as expected. Less than a month later, Elon Musk’s Space X launched their much larger Falcon Heavy rocket and put its payload–an actual Tesla roadster sports car–into orbit around the sun. The news grabbed headlines around the world.

  Over the past year, we have been tracking more and more organizations and people who intentionally create spectacles like these to attract predictable attention. Welcome to the age of the Strategic Spectacle, in which more industries than ever will resort to leveraging big stunts and engaging experiences like these to attract attention and make a bold statement.

  Immersive “Museums”

  After Mary Ellis Bunn and Manish Vora announced the opening of the Museum of Ice Cream[2] in Manhattan—a pop-up venue featuring whimsical ice-cream-themed interactive exhibits—tickets sold out within three days. Over the course of a month, lucky ticketholders eagerly awaited their chance to to swim in a pool of ice cream sprinkles, walk through a gallery of suspended plastic bananas, and climb on a giant ice cream sandwich swing. It was a huge sensation.

  Some critics rightly noted that the Museum of Ice Cream was hardly a museum, but rather a colorful collection of themed backdrops. Visitors did not walk away with a deeper understanding of much of anything. They did, however, take lots and lots of photos. Designed specifically to be as Instagram-friendly as possible, the Museum of Ice Cream’s colorful, picture-perfect galleries were, predictably, popular fodder for sharing on social media—and drove big engagement and word of mouth from visitors hungry to share unique selfies with their followers.

  Since the museum’s short run in Manhattan in 2016, Bunn and Vora have expanded to new locations, including Los Angeles and Miami Beach, and in 2018, even opened a permanent installation in San Francisco. According to them, more than 250,000 people went through the exhibit in Miami Beach, and around 1,700 visit their San Francisco location every day. Though they won’t reveal revenues, it is estimated that this attendance rate could amount to revenues of $20 million for their first two years of operation.

  Over the past year, this tactic to deliver the perfect setting for the ultimate selfie has fueled the openings of what one critic called “Instagram-optimized funhouses,”[3] each hoping to wow visitors with ever more colorful and Instagrammable spectacles. Among them, the Happy Place—a multi-sensory collection of 13 colorful rooms “designed to evoke feelings of happiness”—opened its doors in Los Angeles.

  In Tokyo, the popular Kawaii Monster Café offers an eccentric, anime-inspired restaurant with a colorfully cartoonish menu and a devoted staff dressed as popular cosplay characters. It has become a destination for Japanese diners and tourists alike, with dance parties, multicolored alien-themed desserts,
and plenty of strobe lights for effect.

  Kawaii Monster Cafe in Tokyo, Japan

  Each of these experiences appeals to people’s consistent desire to share happy and unique moments to fuel their hunger for social reinforcement online. The more people visit and have this “unique” experience, the more everyone wants to have that same experience for themselves, take the same photo, and share in the same spectacle.

  These pop-up “art” installations are not only creating Strategic Spectacles by launching Instagram-bait experiences, they are also bridging the divide between art experience and retail destination. In the summer of 2018, for example, the Museum of Ice Cream’s founding team created a pop-up “grocery” in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood called the Pint Shop, which offered merchandise, tastings, and museum-branded apparel.

  Experiential Retail

  The shift toward maximizing the spectacle in the retail environment, exemplified by the Museum of Ice Cream’s new pop-up grocery venture, is one we have been tracking and writing about since 2011. We first described it as the Culting of Retail trend and followed it in 2012 with a trend we named Retail Theater. Today, the concept of the retail environment as a place in which theater and spectacle co-exist is common.

  Similar to the immersive experiences offered by pop-up “art” installations, Samsung’s flagship store in New York City was conceived as an interactive playground for shoppers. In the massive 56,000 square foot store, visitors can participate in a virtual reality ride, hang out in a DJ booth, lounge in comfortable living-room-like settings, or even catch a free concert. Unlike most other retail destinations, the point of Samsung 837, as it is called, isn’t really to sell anything. At least not directly. The point is to use a Strategic Spectacle to generate attention by encouraging people to try the products, and hopefully share their experience of doing so with their friends through social media.