Trend Forecasting
My passion for trends began as an Industrial Design student back in the day(early 2010’s). I knew of trends and had seen The Devil Wears Prada, and witnessed/learned from Meryl Streep’s savage “Cerulean Scene” like everyone else. But all of this knowledge was not that interesting to me, and was mostly related to the fashion industry while I was a little geeky inventor. Sure, as far as trends went, I could figure out how to put together a cool looking outfit if I cared. But at that point, I could only have done it by looking at what was in stores, what had been “selected for me” as Meryl puts it.
This all changed one day in 2011, when I had my cerulean scene. We had a meeting with a trend forecaster during my first design position as a Jewelry Design intern. She was apparently going to tell us what was “cool” before everyone else knew. Why? Because as a Designer, you have to know what’s “in” months-if not years -in advance. We need the time to design, manufacture, and ship to stores. Trends have to hit just at the right time. Trend forecasting is therefore so valuably intertwined with business, it’s actually seen as a skill in the business world, or even as a business in and of itself, as our friend was about to show us.
“Arrows and robots are going to be so hot! Definitely create some arrow designs” she said. “You need a few art deco pieces as well, the older crowd will of course be drawn to that aesthetic more”. …. “What am I hearing? I unwittingly entered into The Devil Wears Prada???” I thought to myself.
I was a bit judgmental at first… why was this woman hurling random ideas into our line? What exactly is her logic? We’re basing our business on some psychic? My respect for my boss momentarily became shaky. When she left, I asked my boss more about what makes a “trend forecaster” and how they work. It didn’t really hit me, though, until months later, when I did begin to see robots and arrows scattered everywhere from jewelry to prints to purses and logos (they’re still in prints and logos, 9 years later the crossed arrow logo format just wont die).
There was something here, and I needed to get to the bottom of it.
Later, while somehow landing a spot studying at Korea’s top art university, Hongik, I signed up for a class called “Design Trend Research” offered by a German IBM designer. I had never been told to consider trends in my designs in school, and I was nearly a senior! It was like a dirty little secret no one ever talked about at my school (it was heavily engineering based). The class was cancelled due to a scheduling error, but I was so excited by the fact that design in other cultures was so open to trend research that they taught them in school.
I spoke with the professor to learn more, and since he had already created the documents for the class, he just gave them to me to learn from, in the name of furthering my education. I believe that reading through them all was really the pivotal moment for me concerning trend research. I began to truly see the place that trends had -not just in fashion design, and not just in industrial design- but in every industry, every facet of life.
This I will go into later, but one of my main points I’ll be reiterating in this blog is how universal and far reaching trends can be. You would be very surprised how much you are affected by trends. They’re not just capitalist or consumerist, they’re so deep that they affect seemingly unrelated things like who we are, who we date, who we vote for, who lives next to us, food available to us in the store, and eventually… it trickles up to… society as a whole.
This is a complicated and abstract phenomenon. It’s a phenomenon of phenomenona, like strings all wrapped up together. Each string affecting all the other strings, and the sum of all creating the web of life.
