6 Trends From Cotton & Turner

Help!

• The world is becoming an overwhelming and at times scary place.
  Folk aren’t just waiting to jump in their SUVs to dash down to their
  shopping mall to buy your product – they’ve got money concerns,
  environment concerns and stress.
• Authentic and transparency trust trends are shifting to just "Get Real."

Kevin Bacon

• Like Bacon, people and information are becoming connected in a way never known in human history.
• Tech access allows kids to feel they are members of a global
  community though they may never have left Iowa. More and more kids live
  in uniquely complex worlds hidden from adult access at times running
  their lives like adults run their businesses.
• Some even outsource their *electronic* role playing when they’re at school.

I Got Soul

• Jody talked about the raw emotions of people. Younger generations
  will expect sustainability built in to products as a matter of course
  and as an inseparable part of future design stories.
• Other folk will seek slower lifestyles with individualized
  anti-hip, anti-modern aspects to it for balance and refreshing shift.
• Some will feel permission to create new ways of seeing, being and
  sharing simply through the wide choices available and the overabundant
  and overlapping aspects of product and service in culture and society
  today.

It’s All About Me

• Ed spoke about Immedia – about collaboration and about the impact
  on the workplace: if it now costs only $10,000 to set up a company via
  the web, why would anyone become an employee?
• Jody added that entrepreneurial sensibilities are influencing
  companies internally. If the consumer is constantly feeding themselves
  with live cultural currency, is evolving and shifting loyalties from
  brand to momentary experiences then companies are feeling permission to
  shift the static paradigms internally too.
• The organic sideways sharing, co-creation consumer is bringing
  down the hierarchical and iconic brand structures of days past. With
  that, ‘Me’ culture is moving to ‘We’ culture. 

Polysensory

• We find new ways to explore the things around us with all our senses.
• We no longer see ourselves as separate from nature and ‘the
  environment’ embracing quantum approaches of ‘we are what we observe’.
  This changes how we inhabit our bodies and how we interact with what we
  seek to experience.
• A Bavarian Forest has a walkway that allows people to walk
  through the branches, touching leaves. A recent computer concept
  demonstrated an approach that seemed to allow users to drink computer
  graphics.
• This is our future domain!