Fjord Trends look back: 2019
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 twelve.
This episode our Fjord Trends 2022 countdown is all about 2019 and it’s written by Ted Kilian of Fjord Singapore.
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. We wrote these trends in the context of Professor Stephen Hawking passing away aged 76, and a man trying to steal the Magna Carta from Salisbury Cathedral. It was also the year in which Prince Harry married Meghan Markle, women in Saudi Arabia became able to get driving licenses, and twelve boys and their football coach were rescued from flooded caves in Thailand.
Over to Ted…
My favorite trend: Space odyssey
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What we said back then…
First, digital drove us to our screens. Then, physical fought back. Both dramatically changed our expectations of the physical world — first in retail, then in the workplace and soon in public spaces. Now, as digital and physical intertwine, organizations must find ways to seamlessly interconnect digital and physical experiences. This will require a fundamental rethink of the approaches and tools for designing spaces in order to meet users’ expectations of greater flexibility and personalization.
I was drawn to this trend quite naturally because my pre-consulting life was as an urban geographer studying public space. People have been talking about how digital will make space irrelevant for years, but the truth has always been more complicated. In 2019 when people had been predicting the death of retail for years, this trend called out the ways in which physical space remained completely relevant even as it was transformed.
Now, having lived through almost two years of the global pandemic even more dramatically transforming how we conceive of and our physical environment, the challenges raised in 2019 are still relevant, but amped up to a previously unimaginable level. Now, it is not only the question of how retail will reshape itself to find renewed relevance, but also how downtown cores, office workplaces, and urban residential centers will look in years to come.
I live in Singapore, but my extended family lives mainly in Texas, so we have collectively experienced almost opposite ends of responses to the pandemic at government and individual levels, with one driving strong, determined and accepted top-down mandates on behavior, and the other taking almost the opposite approach. I expect we will see equally divergent adaptations in the post-pandemic reimagining of space that is to come.In some ways, our increased needs-driven use of remote connectivity tools and expended ways of working, communicating, eating, shopping and entertaining ourselves have made the friction of distance less relevant. But in other ways, it only reinforces how important direct human connection is.
My mother passed away after a long bout with Alzheimer’s in 2020 and I was unable to attend her funeral and be with my family, but it also felt quite “normal” to attend the funeral virtually followed by a zoom call with my family. It is at those moments that you realise how far our “connected” technology is from being enough to sustain fundamental human connection even as we get more comfortable with it.
It will be the tension between these opposites that shapes our physical and virtual future. As designers, we are now challenged to think about how physical and digital aspects of our world can and should work together. How will we rethink the interconnected systems of location, connection, and distance that exist today in ever-changing balance?
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