The Next Trend in Design

Given the alacrity with which design managers uphold and then forget about future trends, it’s worth asking: Where do such trends really come from?

This introduction from the FULL article, when can be downloaded below, begins to ask how we can forecast the next one, and be sure that it won’t simply be a transient fad?

Introduction

In April 2011, Bruce Nussbaum, one of the foremost advocates of design thinking (DT), pronounced it a ‘‘failed experiment’’ (Nussbaum, 2011). After this summary verdict, Nussbaum asked, naturally enough, ‘‘What’s next?’’ This article replies to that question.

Nussbaum’s own reply was interesting. He upheld what he called ‘‘humanistic design,’’ and described it as ‘‘a huge advance in the field.’’ However, he did not define, still less give examples of, humanistic design. Instead, he went on to outline a third concept—‘‘creative intelligence.’’ Around that concept, he plans to publish a book in late 2012.

For designers and design managers, having an opinion about trends in design has always been important. In prewar America alone, industrial designers such as Henry Dreyfuss, Walter Dorwin Teague, Raymond Loewy, and Norman Bel Geddes positioned themselves as knowing a thing or two about the future. Fashion design, too, has long been oriented to color forecasting, and trend forecasting in general. Design managers have often pronounced one trend dead and upheld another one. Still, it is a bit new to do both of these things, and then say that a third designerly world view deserves a book.

A cursory inspection of trends in the handling of design trends, then, reveals a certain relativism of outlook. Anything goes, pretty much: One projection may be as good as another, and much depends on this or that design manager’s point of view. In other words, design managers both adopt and abandon intellectual trends rather quickly nowadays. Before we suggest what the next trend in design should be, therefore, we should first ask: Just why are trends so trendy these days?

Of course, when designers such as Loewy or Bel Geddes pushed through ideas about the future to clients, there was always an element of arbitrariness about their views. In their time, style was of unrivaled importance. The subjective approach of great designers had yet to give way to more organized conceptions of design management, or of the future. However, for all the realities of today’s global production, both design managers and celebrity designers still lack a sensible compass to steer them toward The Next Big Thing in Design.

Perhaps, really, two trends in the handling of design trends are at issue here. On the one hand, and certainly over the past 15 years or so, the growing impulse for companies, design managers, and designers has been to cast the future in terms of design for corporate social responsibility, ethics, lowering adverse impacts on the environment, and — above all — lowering emissions of CO2.

When designers put forward a broadly Greenish interpretation of the future, as a future of sustainability, they suggest a trend of planetary significance. This story of the future is more imposing than other grand narratives in design, such as Modernism, Postmodernism, or an orientation to users.

The scale of the trend predicted here — The Future is Green — looks large. Also, advocates of this point of view feel that, when they uphold an acceleration of that trend, they are design activists who are morally right and who will have history on their side. However, the relentless and repetitive subordination of all goals and most other anticipated trends to the demand for sustainable design suggests that something is wrong. Steering professionals to the Next Trend in Design has been done with a compass that is stuck. Here the future is always just an extension of the present. The trend is: Redouble efforts to save the earth—against which all other trends, whether objective or hoped for, are of little moment.

On the other hand, the willingness of the design world to proclaim and then drop overfamiliar and ill-thought-out lists of many new trends is today very high. Here the compass spins around. Often described as ‘‘futures,’’ and emboldened by the multiple options of scenario planning, the future here is variable, protean, and hard to pin down. Interestingly, too, the spread of multiple, pluralistic conceptions of the future is expressed in the
activist form of manifestos for design (though not for design management). Since 1883, more than 60 design manifestos have been published; and, confirming the ‘‘depends on your point of view’’ mentality, the trend is for more manifestos to be published each year. No fewer than 35 have come out since 2000 (Emerson, 2009).

The desire to mold the world is commendable, but most designers and design managers lack training in the analysis of trends, and that doesn’t help. Worse, design managers in particular have a weakness for taking on new management doctrines in an eclectic and far-too-cozy spirit. Particularly in the United States, where Tom Peters’ and Robert Waterman Jr.’s In Search of Excellence (1982) popularized trendy catchphrases for  corporations, design managers have drawn upon bestselling management books as an inspiration for thinking about the next trend in design.

In 1986, just a few years after Peters and Waterman published their book, BusinessWeek ran a cover story on business fads (see Figure 1; Byrne, 1986). The cover alone shows how capricious thinking about trends can be — with business managers as well as design managers.

At least BusinessWeek had tongue firmly in cheek. Yet given the alacrity with which design managers uphold and then forget about future trends, it’s worth asking: Where do such trends really come from? How can we forecast the next one, and be sure that it won’t simply be a transient fad? Most important: How can we make a simple, convincing, intelligent, and un-faddish new argument for design, which absorbs those merits that DT has, but which moves designers on toward a more practical and yet more ambitious practice?

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To open and download the FULL article, click on this The Next Trend in Design link.