Fjord Trends look back: 2015
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 eight.
This episode our Fjord Trends 2022 countdown is all about 2015 and it’s written by Ashley Benigno, Group Director at Fjord Milan.
As with everything, context is king, so let’s set the scene for the year leading up to launch, with some cultural references that might take you right back. A flight and its passengers went missing, an Ebola outbreak quickly spread across west Africa, and Russia annexed Crimea and threatened the rest of Ukraine. In lighter news, “Guardians of the Galaxy” dominated the box office, Sochi hosted the Winter Olympics and Rio staged the Olympic Games, and “Frozen” changed the soundtrack in many families’ homes.
Over to Ashley…
My favorite trend: Digital dieting
By Ashley Benigno
What we said back then…
Services and users mindfully compartmentalize connectivity to live beyond the screen. In research, the most consistent observation was the tension between our attention on digital and our need to focus on the real world around us. “I’m addicted to the screen and resent it” echoes other research which reveals that we look at our phones over 1500 times a week, but is this concern a generational one?
I zeroed in on this trend largely because of how things have evolved since it was published. It turns out that the issues it touches on developed into headline-grabbing challenges in the intervening years, with social media addiction and mental health implications front of mind for everyone involved in digital design. Digital dieting neatly captures the tension around how we still use — and abuse — digital services.
Particularly interesting is the use of the word “dieting”, which has turned out to be more pertinent than I imagine the trend’s authors knew at the time. Idealized virtual representations of ourselves and the prolific use of filters designed to make us look perfect have been found to directly influence our view of ourselves and our bodies. Body dysmorphia is on the rise, and people have been taking filtered pictures of themselves to plastic surgeons, to represent their desired outcome.
This idealism extends beyond our physical appearance to all shareable aspects of life. People are naturally inclined to project the best parts of their lives and hide the more messy or challenging realities, meaning that their followers feel increasingly overwhelmed by their perceived failure to live similarly.
As designers, it wasn’t long ago that we were focused on crafting “sticky” products that would keep people using our services as much as possible. Over the years, Fjord Trends has been excellent at tracking people’s behaviors and societal challenges, and has moved on from this techno-optimism to a more nuanced position that focuses on identifying and avoiding the potential pitfalls. Increasingly, our work is about understanding the trade-off between the persuasiveness of the tools we build versus their impact on people’s wellbeing.
Just last year, our trends looked at shifting from a long-held belief in human-centered design to life-centered design, which takes a systemic view of a service’s effects on the planet and broader society, as well as individual users. It’s this kind of enlightened, empathetic thinking that makes Fjord Trends a must-read for anyone involved in digital design. I can’t wait to read the next batch.
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