Design trends to boom 2021
Fine. 2020 is (un)fortunately coming to an end. It’s been a year we probably ran out of adjectives for, and so with total recklessness, as a tradition we’ve started last year, we’re trying to draw a line between what’s been and what will probably be.
In our podcast, (un)fortunately in Italian, every damn Monday of 2020, we covered news about design at large, taking on the burden and the honour of constantly tracking the present to identify 9 possible trends that will accompany us in 2021 and probably beyond.
These trends are not meant to speak exclusively to designers. So, spoiler alert, you won’t read anything about trendy software, brilliant methodologies, must-read books with quotes for your presentations, nor divine techniques for smart-working and all those other designer-centric things. Everybody else does that. Our visions are for everybody who lives here, on planet Earth with us and who, with a bit of curiosity, are interested in what is happening today and hungry for what will happen tomorrow, told and explained from our point of view and somehow justified by the news and signals we have received during this year.
We’ll also expand on these 9 trends during 3 episodes of our podcast, always (un)fortunately in Italian, out from the 4th of January for the first 3 Mondays of 2021. So, read them in advance now and then we’ll talk about them together on our Spotify and Youtube channels.
Now let’s start with the trends otherwise, we’ll never finish, as you see we love to talk. And that’s right.
1 — COUNT ME IN
Inclusiveness is probably the word we have become the most used to during this year, a guideline to follow and a very real and inevitable question to ask ourselves.
The normalisation of what used to be considered imperfections is more and more evident. And it’s a good thing too. This year Gucci threw the dilemma of objective beauty in everybody’s face, opening the way to social reflections that not only the fashion industry, always a pioneer in this sense, has grasped. The beauty industry is also changing, with brands such as Espressoh and Humanrace which have managed to talk about acceptance and makeup authentically and originally.
The movie industry is clearly the main vehicle for this metamorphosis: in movies and tv series we are finally seeing more attention being paid to character development, which is far more complex, interesting, psychologically rich and perhaps unusual. An attention that is not trivial and not casual, a symptom of a society that is changing and knows very well what it is becoming.
The battle for acceptance of its own body, its nuances and magical weaknesses is heating up. And it is in front of everyone’s eyes.
— Communicate for who you are, communicate to all: talk to a few to reach many and if needed, speak up.
2 — GENERATION UNTARGETTABLES
Over the last few years, words and letters have been used to define entire generations, with specific interests, defining huge clusters of people. It is no longer like so. Profiling a human being is increasingly difficult (also as a consequence of the above trend), each person has his or her interests and they are often very specific indeed.
The year 2020 marked the establishment and consolidation of micro-communities as real powerhouses in the growth of social media, we have seen major changes by Facebook and the explosion of Reddit entirely based on the concept of micro-communities with specific interests.
It is no longer difficult to believe that within a group, such as “food lovers” for example, there are so many specific niches such as “French pastry lovers” and “Japanese meat lovers” that ironically these two groups no longer share any topics of discussion. As a brand, talking to these two people is profoundly different, especially when all the other interests a human being may share are thrown into the mix.
— Know who you are talking to, dive into new interests, solve specific problems.
3 — DOUBLE-SIDED ME
Although we are now used to interacting online using our digital self, are we ready to interact in the real world using our digital profile?
The marriage of these two forms is not yet so obvious: in Italy, the first steps towards a digital identity are being taken, a path where China is now light years ahead.
Since 2016, Burberry has been allowing its boutique staff to recognise customers registered to its online services, providing valuable information to shop assistants, such as their past purchases or the items they liked, to pamper and offer the best possible service to its customers.
Today, Levi’s is raising the bar even higher by intervening in the layout and logistics of its shops based on its customers’ digital data.
Online shopping on the other hand seems to have been stationary for decades, with more or less animated web pages offering a usually linear experience towards the purchase. Real-life is not like that, and the folks at Complex have tried to innovate the online shopping experience, with a site/game/event that simulates one of those festivals that make you spend a lot of money.
— Take the best of both worlds, digital and analogue, to create unknowingly familiar experiences.
4 — STAYIN’ E-LIVE
2020 was a year of video calling. A year of “Can you hear me?”, “Can you see me?”, “Am I sharing my screen?” spent on platforms designed when video calling was only a business need. This huge deficit has favoured the rise of new ways and new services that have re-interpreted and re-invented a “call”, like Houseparty for instance. Platforms such as Among Us exploded by leveraging simplicity and game rules that use distance and suspicion between friends (and strangers): it wouldn’t be remotely the same game if it were played sitting around a table together.
We have been training from home, a lot, allowing Apple to confidently launch its fitness service which, as in the above trend, combines the advantage of group training with the availability of data from users, useful to design courses as participative and tailor-made as possible.
Keynotes, on the other hand, have come to a complete stop, but they have not just been sitting back, including augmented reality in presentations or taking the opportunity to communicate face-to-face intimately as Mark has decided to do.
Live concerts have taken the opportunity to innovate and move into new platforms, with real ad hoc designed experiences, live but digital.
Digital communication is clearly looking for its own unique form of interaction, with new platforms, new technologies and new ways of participation.
— Embrace the limits and potential of digital to offer new experiences, complementary to traditional ones, not similar.
5 — MASCOTTES ARE BACK
Have you ever thought about how difficult it is today for a brand to entrust its image to a real person? A person with all their ideals, constantly under the spotlight, ready to say or do something wrong? Breaking news: it is very difficult.
Influencers are becoming more and more popular and it’s time for brands to communicate through something personal, maybe even literally create their own influencers.
We have seen Lil Miquela growing with more and more collaborations with more and more important brands.
This year we also have learned to love Baby Yoda, everyone, even those who have never seen (or didn’t like) The Mandalorian or even Star Wars. Ok, maybe love is a bit much, but really, raise your hand if you don’t know who Baby Yoda is or have no idea what he looks like. It’s impossible.
The equation though is simple, but not obvious.
Baby Yoda = Mandalorian = Disney
Sure, it sounds obvious. But now try to think about how many and in which situations you have seen Baby Yoda. Exactly. He appeared with celebrities or around the internet even when his role had absolutely nothing to do with it: he was simply the Disney spokesman.
Not everyone will create great testimonials, of course, but the ability to design your own testimonials internally, to flavour them with all the nuances and values that characterise a brand and that can speak for the brand in different contexts is a weapon to communicate effectively within the chaos.
— Create a character that is unique and true to your values: someone will love it.
6 — BROKEN NEWS
2020 has probably been the lowest point reached by digital (and other) information.
Fake news has become our daily business, filled with manipulated photos, videos and audio to decontextualise entire concepts.
Nvidia has made great progress using AI for the creation of contents, as well as our friends at Adobe, who (considering their decade-long support for content editing) have tried to put a patch on it this year with an initiative that tries to solve the problem by giving users the possibility to retrieve the original content even after it has been modified or manipulated.
The road will certainly be long and the business models to be explored are countless, to achieve what can be defined as healthy information.
One model that is seeing a rebirth is the newsletter, an editorial product that is based primarily on the trust that readers place in the product. There is no need to bait people with a headline or a provocative photo to increase page views just to sell advertising: like traditional newspapers, with newsletters readers pay for the quality of the content or just the selection they periodically find in their mail and trust the people who collect that content, just like the curator of an exhibition does with works of art. Furthermore, this allows the creation of almost personal relationships between editors and readers.
— Share your interests, take care of your readers and don’t just sell advertising.
7 — PROXEMIX UNPROXEMIX
Let’s face it: being up close is no longer as good as it used to be. Our proxemics bubble has definitely expanded, taking even the zone of intimacy a little further.
We need more space especially in public places, such as in offices, but also in the domestic environment.
Intolerance for the chaos of the city and its confined domestic spaces is leading to a boom in the purchase of larger homes in quieter areas, and to phenomena like south working in Italy, where smart working is moving people from chaotic, productive big cities to quieter, more economical towns and villages.
The office is therefore looking for a new dimension to cover great distances. Distances that can now be bridged with new virtual reality experiences.
The virtual world is creating a real second world where our spaces continue to be redefined. Examples such as Decentraland allow us to also consider the Internet as a real space of interaction with other people, which is not limited to a 2D linear experience or a chat, in fact creating (and inventing) a real interest in the digital real estate market.
— Rediscover your spaces, discover new spaces and redefine their value.
8 — THE EGO MOBILITY
For a thousand reasons, 2020 has made electric vehicles completely mainstream. The myth of the last mile seems to have been embodied in the electric scooters that are now crowding our cities.
Cities are changing as mobility changes, with so many small, individual vehicles becoming more friendly to people.
If individual mobility now seems to ride on two wheels with a handlebar, the (new) world of the automotive seems to become the most interesting scenario for the upcoming years.
Companies such as REE, Volkswagen and TUC are reinventing the car, creating modular systems that allow electric cars to be conceived as tech products that can be designed just like spaces to be furnished.
MINI itself has presented a concept that transforms the car into a moving living room, a shared space where people can spend time while travelling, completely changing the classic way of using a car and the way people behave in it. Amazon, on the other hand, with a more utilitarian approach, has shown us with Zoox the future of taxis, electric and self-driving, with a car that exists but has nothing to do with anything we see today on the roads.
— The time to move between two points is an ocean of new possibilities to the extent that ‘moving’ seems to have become a secondary need.
9 — HOME MY GOD
The amount of time we spend in small apartments has changed our relationship with space, but above all the relationship we have with our homes. The home is no longer just the place to end your day, but where you spend most of your time.
We have seen this with the architectural trend of furnishing very small spaces to not renounce on anything and with the continuous launch of furniture that optimises unused spaces converting into something else when needed, like a gym for instance.
It is not only the management of space that has changed but also the way we interact with the purchases we make: practically all businesses have had to approach shipping, from the more practical to the more experiential, focusing on packaging and the packaging experience. Packaging becomes the vector for the experiences that come into our homes. For the everyday products, it is a need for efficiency, using less and less material to be environmentally friendly, for the more experiential products, packaging becomes the product itself, the reason to choose delivery over the brick-and-mortar experience.
— Bring your ideal experience into people’s homes. Today you can play it all on a simple cardboard box.
So now, wrapping up:
1 — COUNT ME IN
The concept of beauty is becoming increasingly broad. It is no longer just about acceptance but about fearlessly showing all the nuances of your personality.
2 — GENERATION UNTARGETTABLES
People’s interests are increasingly narrow and diversified. Classifying people according to generic preferences is now simply counterproductive. We need to face up to this.
3 — DOUBLE-SIDED ME
Our digital personalities increasingly resemble our physical ones, while traditional interactions are beginning to feel the need for digital integration.
4 — STAYIN’ E-LIVE
Seeing the latest concert live on the Internet is no longer enough. Now we want to participate! New scenarios of digital interaction and engagement are waiting for you at the box office.
5 — MASCOTTES ARE BACK
Brands need to communicate a lot of messages, effectively. There's nothing like a brand new completely digital personality to start doing that, well.
6 — BROKEN NEWS
If this was fake-news, you would have no way of checking it out. Trust is the new business model of digital information, not advertising.
7 — PROXEMIX UNPROXEMIX
We need more space, on a small and large scale. New spaces and new places will host experiences that will eventually feel familiar.
8 — THE EGO MOBILITY
Moving around cities takes time. And mobility is being completely revolutionised right in front of our eyes. Are we sure we just want to move?
9 — HOME MY GOD
We demand much more from our homes, from a place to end the day to a multifunctional place to try and receive new experiences.
Awesome! If you enjoyed our 9 visions (but also if you’d like to add something), we’ll catch on our Spotify and Youtube channels from Monday 4th January to talk about it together, some more. It is gonna be cool.
Meanwhile, knock us on Instagram.
And if you want, spread the love.
Have a great, full-of-cool-design 2021! Daje 💫
Giuliano, Nanni, Riccardo ☕️
