15 years of Fjord Trends: looking forward to 2022
Fifteen years of making business and design predictions, but how do our thoughts through the years seem to us now?
Fjord Trends 2022 will be our fifteenth report into what’s coming up for the business and design industries. To celebrate this milestone, we’ve asked some of our leadership team to pick out one trend from each of the past 15 years, to share their own thoughts and to ponder how things have panned out since. This is part fifteen — the part where we reflect on the past and look to the future.
This episode our Fjord Trends 2022 countdown is all about 2022 and it’s written by Nick de la Mare of North America Design Lead of Fjord, part of Accenture Interactive.
As with everything, context is king, so let’s look at the backdrop against which we’ve been crafting our next trends report. 2021 has been the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic — countries around the globe have experienced lengthy lockdown periods, spent more on face masks and sanitizer than ever before, and shelved physical contact like handshakes, high fives and friendly hugs. This year has also seen Tokyo stage the delayed 2020 Olympic and Paralympic games, and British teenager Emma Raducanu smash her way to a historical win at the US Open.
Over to Nick…
Looking forward to 2022
By Nick de la Mare
Through these past fifteen years of trends, I’ve noticed a steady increase in how much we talk about the experience of being human. Of course, we talk about technology, business and the design practice, but the lens through which we view these things and everything else is becoming ever more about people.
We’ve talked about empathy and the importance of organizations being seen to align with and act on the values that matter most to people. We’ve explored the notion of crafting products and services for employees that are every bit as delightful as those we make for customers. We’ve examined the way people’s behaviors and decision-making habits evolve, and speculated what changes are coming next. We’ve looked at the way people work, and at the shifts in the balance of power between employer and employee.
One of the key things to come out of the pandemic is a radical change in our ways of working. I spoke to a recruiter recently who said that pre-pandemic, requesting partial home-working rarely went the employee’s way, but it’s become a standard expectation for most new contracts.
We’ve come to expect a much bigger degree of work/life fluidity. For instance, I have friends who work for a global firm and have chosen to move to Portugal, even though most of their dealings are with colleagues in the USA. They’ve been able to create a working, living and sleeping schedule that is fully flexible. They get their work done and they’re contactable when people expect to be able to reach them, but they can live in a part of the world they love, exploring a new culture and lifestyle, and massively enriching their life experience.
Obviously, there are people for whom this kind of flexible arrangement simply wouldn’t work, be that because of their profession, industry, or family setup. But for those who have enlightened employers willing to allow them the freedom to try and make it work, it’s become a real option. This is a world away from the way things were only a couple years ago, and it’s fascinating to see how extreme this transformation in attitudes has been, in such a short time.
I think the overarching point, when you get right to the nub of it, is that we simply value people more highly with each passing year. Political and social movements that strive for equity and equality for all people are making their voices heard, hitting the headlines all the time. While the change they want might be slower to come about, I believe we’re now in a world where more people are listening. Trying to do better, and to be better.
Our trends this year are really about people and the human experience. As ever, we’ve worked hard on them with over 2,000 colleagues around the globe, listened to their experiences, observations and ideas, and pulled together the best set of trends we can muster. We hope you get as much out of reading them as we’ve got out of crafting them.
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