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A generalist approach for spotting trends by Grant McCracken (author, Culture and Consumption).

Rule 1:

Take any possibility seriously. The new wouldn’t be new unless it
defied expectation. All ideas, even crazy ones, must be taken
seriously.

Rule 2:

Install a good SETI system. This is about pattern recognition. Rule
1 means that we are going to have lots and lots of “trend candidates.”
We need some culling system that allows us to get rid of false
positives. In the case of the real SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence), there are 5 steps: 1) collect data, 2) find candidate
signals, 3) check data integrity, 4) remove radio interference, 5)
identify final candidates.

Clearly, these two rules are related. The credulity of Step 1
exposes us the chaos of too many trend candidates, and obliges us to
embrace a Step 2 that sorts out the real trends from the apparent ones.
Indeed, the wider we cast the credulity net, the more formidable must
be our powers of pattern recognition. Or, the formula I prefer: the
better prepared we are intellectually to spot a trend, the more widely
we may cast the net.

In fact, we could say that these two rules force an interesting and
necessary intersection in a Venn diagram: where the circle 1 of
dreamers/droolers/utterlyingenuous overlaps with the circle 2 of
hardheaded/toughminded/cleareyed. This is a very good place to be, not
least because in a culture in which anything is possible no longer
finds much of interest in someone who sees that everything is possible.
(“The world supplies that, we don’t need you.”) The real question is
whether any given possibility contains any trace of plausibility,
whether it might visit us, that is to say, not just in the imagination
but in the world. But, I am missing the obvious (comme toujours): the
intersection of circles 1 and 2 is for certain purposes precisely the
characteristic intersection of culture and commerce (not to mention the
place this blog sits). 

An example given McCracken:

"So, anyhow, I’m reading the New York Times today, and there is a
story about a guy who’s renovating his place and decided that he will
have no chrome, steel, aluminum, nickel or any brushed, satin or
polished metal in his home.

As he put it, “No visible metal has become my new obsession.”

Rule 1 says that we must consider this as a new trend candidate. No
more metal. No more homes that shine, gleam or even glow. Good bye to
all those bright, shiny bits in the kitchen and bathroom. Good bye to
anything sleek or polished. Good bye to anything light bearing.

At first, this seems ludicrous. What are the chances that North
American householders would ever forsake “visible metal?” But if we are
reacting simply against sheer implausibility, this must give us pause.
Sheer implausibility is, in fact, the best chance that this trend
candidate deserves a hearing. The really new new must always offend us
in this way. If someone had tried to tell us that middle class
householders would someday install industrial strength stoves in their
suburban kitchens, we would have laughed at them.

Rule 2 says that we must root through the intellectual toolkit to
see if we have anything that would provide “skids,” a way to “dock” the
candidate trend with what we know and a future we can imagine. There
are lots of approaches here, but one particularly jumped out at me:
brightwork. Brightwork is the name for the bits of metal on North
Americans cars. It was especially current in the 1950s.

The term is sufficiently arcane that my Microsoft spell checker does
not recognize it, and now shows it with that accusing red underline
that says, summon your best imitation of a highly judgmental Bill
Gates, “you have made a mistake” or, as it will be understood for the
remainder of this blog entry, “this is a trend candidate for which we
cannot vouch. Proceed at your own risk. Low Headroom.”

One of the points of brightwork was to make cars look fast. It
helped to create the impression that the car was “streaming” forward.
It was brightwork, among other things, that helped give the impression
that cars were “moving even when standing still,” a phrase of high
praise for cars at mid century.

I cannot prove, but I do nevertheless believe, that there was a deep
cultural connection here: the appearance of motion that brightwork
supplied and a temporal orientation that prized the idea that
individuals, corporations and countries were “moving forward,” “racing
into the future,” and otherwise, “on their way up.” The confusion of
movement in space and time was, I think, a key article of mid century
modernism. (This is, I know, a ludicrously grand claim and I have
substantiated it to some extent in Culture and Consumption II, in an
essay on the 1954 Buick.)

Anyhow, the “brightwork” idea gives us a way to think about the
trend candidate presented by the NYT author. If he is removed
brightwork from his home, we might suppose that other individuals will
do so if and when they decide that the home should be stripped of these
important traces of dynamism, that they wish to retreat from a culture
that prizes individual and collective mobility, that one of the new
objectives of interior design is aesthetic stillness. Naturally, I
can’t even begin to imagine whether any of these things are true. But I
know have a set of auxiliary trend candidates, the encouragement of
anyone of which would help reinforce the “candidacy” of the “no metal
trend.”

This is not a great example, perhaps. The brightwork notion will
test your credulity even more than the “no metal” one. But it does
suggest how “rule 2” might apply here. And this gives weight to the
notion that trend watching should be left not to the hippest person in
the room but the person who actually knows something about the culture
in question.

We all know who I am talking about. The cool hunters who take good
corporate dollars in return for a recitation of all the things you end
up taking for granted if you live in TriBeCa. These poor creatures
don’t have intellectual depths. They only have tabloid-like surfaces.
They can only reflect what is. They cannot reflect upon it. One of
these days I am going to name names. I really am. It is time to remove
this “radio interference” that we might examine the future with new
clarity."

References
Marin, Rick.  2005.  Heave-Ho, Silver!  The New York Times.  April 7, 2005. 

Link: This Blog Sits at the: how to spot a trend.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 29th, 2005 at 9:09 am and is filed under Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.