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Communities

A few years ago, while doing field research in parts of rural Maharashtra, I realized the importance of keeping my eyes open. A family of five wove bamboo baskets and sold them at the local market and had two mobile phones. One was used as a landline, the other as a mobile phone. The ‘landline’ was kept constantly on charge due to frequent power cuts and hung low from the plug point. This is a common pattern I recognized through my visits to many houses in the village. This simple image gave rise to many cultural, ergonomic and design challenges in my head. It had a defined space as a landline, was a shrine to technology and something for neighbours to come, see, and use. Its mobility was not taken advantage of, its potential hazards, increased expenses through unintended calls by children illustrated the need for a serious upheaval of charger designs. One of which is providing space for the phone to rest while it charges.

For any problem, working on the pattern of cause-effect-solution is the most common

one people take up. Similarly, it becomes critical to discern that these behaviours are parts of a pattern, even if in outliers.

Understanding the pulse of a country, what citizens are passionate about, the things they care about become important. Identifying these is what large businesses spend millions of dollars on. It is the starting point of all great if not successful ideas.

Most organizations value leaders who have a vision. Business decisions are often based on predictions – of time, people, behaviours, resources, economies, amongst others. But, these predictions are well, predictions, and there are no sure ways to future-proof ideas.

The idea of keeping one’s eyes open for what is happening in an attempt to understand patterns in behaviours, people, resources, economies, is not new. People are constantly engaged in identifying these. Be it the stock market, the weather or fashion; the last

Communities

Learning by Keeping your Eyes OpenIdentifying trends, fads, and patterns in behaviours through a socio-cultural perspective is key to understanding users’ needs. How these are determined in terms of relevance and impact is important to businesses.

by Nehal Shah Photo Credit: Not Another Dinosaur

Social Technology Quarterly 06

decade has seen the idea evolve into a process – as scientific as research can get. When there is a pattern, one can almost always predict its path.

Trendspotting is often confused with fads and fashion. But the concept of trendspotting is recognizing patterns in their evolution. They could be nascent, be just ideas or thoughts, may become a fad, bring in a behavioural trend, initiate a consumer or lifestyle change, cause a social shift or spark a generational trend even. It is essential to not only identify patterns but also map where they fall on the evolution continuum. On the other hand, a fad is usually something that has a very short life span, affects a few industries but has very high, almost peaking interest. For example, a few years ago there was an obsession with Crocs, the not-so-pretty shoes made of a surprisingly sturdy material called Croslite. It started very small until most people owned either a pair of Crocs or a cheap fake version. In contrast to a fad, a trend is often a complex,

socio-cultural phenomenon that scans lifestyles at a particular point in time. While it would not be right to consider Apple’s iPad as a trend, it is actually the concept of gestural multi-point devices that brings the world to our fingertips, which definitely is a trend.

It would be interesting to note why Psy’s Gangnam Style video became such a rage last month. In his article ‘Gangam Style, Dissected’ in the Atlantic, Max Fisher dissects the mise-en-scène to understand the subversive message of this Korean music video. The kind of social stimuli that it presents and the number of people that have paid attention to the song is incredible. It creates a commentary on contemporary Korean life and styles. Such videos become a starting point to understand social shifts and the pulse of the nation, which could then snowball, or trickle down to the design of new products and services or simply die out.

All fads, trends, social shifts and generational

changes have life spans. While technology and new media trends have the shortest span, fashion comes next, design and consumer trends soon after, and cultural and generational changes being ones with the highest term. But as people with day jobs, keeping track of these can get exhausting.

Today, technology and Social Media makes this much easier. Crowdsourcing ideas help identify trends. Dell’s IdeaStorm site is an example of how a company uses a website as a tool to gauge what ideas are important and relevant to the user. A detailed analysis of what people are asking for, reveal what matters most to them. One is then likely to create a product or a service that satisfies latent needs.

One now has a pile of data, sourced from different areas - looking at magazines, conversing with people, reading research reports, tracking newspapers, watching commercials, deconstructing people’s

Kuliza

Article photo, previous page: A Timeline for

Trends and Technology

Credits: Richard Watson at Nowandnext.com,

Benjamin Frazer at Snap, Oliver Freeman,

Mike Jackson and Scott Martin

Not Another Dinosaur

Left: Moodboarding

Credit: lolololori

Social Technology Quarterly 06

TrendsMap is a better looking engine for real-time Twitter trends that one can filter through proximity or/ and topic. CassandraDaily, is a site for the lazy trendspotter. It collects stories and inspirations and categorizes them into themes. Each theme is supported by live manifestations of the trend. Similarly, for some more focused Indian content, JWT Intelligence produces reports and collects data on trends therefore “...converting cultural shifts into opportunities,” is appropriately their tagline. Springwise is a great resource for innovators and early adopters looking to tap early into a trend. It has informative listings of new and upcoming products and services.

Tracking these help put knowledge into perspective. They provide a framework or a lens through which one would base future decisions. They work across domains and departments, help lead projects, businesses, and organisations in appropriate, valuable directions, and stay ahead of the curve.

fashion sense on the street, and more. Each one is probably suggesting a different trend.

There are a few simple analysis techniques that can help consolidate this information without distilling it. The easiest is to create moodboards by observing the stimuli until patterns emerge. If there is no “The Beautiful Mind” moment happening, one could try and categorize observations into different, non-obvious buckets. Alternatively it is possible to use a moodboard to achieve and communicate this clarity. Anybody who has a “Pin It” applet on the bookmarks bar would already know quite a bit about moodboarding.

These moodboards or themes can be grand, slightly zoomed out trends, and can be applied to any product or service or thought, across any domain. A set of metrics can be used to determine impact, relevance, and uptake of these trends on businesses. The process then is- evaluate, track, and predict it.

While moodboarding and the smell of Fevicol take one back to craft class, it is the very nature of childlike curiosity that makes trendspotting fun. If the smell of Fevicol makes one gag, there is always an app for that; websites in this case: WhatTheTrend collates popular hash tags from Twitter.

Top left: Psy’s Gangnam Style Video

Credit: Starcasm

Top right, 100 things to watch out for in 2012

Credit: JWT Intelligence