Fieldnote #22: In which we start planning a cultural trend report

It is time to go back to the roots and create a classic trend report..

I used to do these all the time as a research gun-for-hire.

The format is straightforward: you chat to a load of people about what’s going on culturally, and then you summarise into a collection of snazzily titled trends.

But this one is going to be different. Because:

1. It is a collaboration with Repowering London, and will be presented at the upcoming ‘Creative Energy Exhibition’ being held mid-September. So the report will have a clean energy/community cooperation slant.
2. It is going to be a part of the Creative Industries London course that I run at UAL. This is an invitation to be very innovative with how this report is made and presented.
3. And, perhaps the most important difference is that this one will be a flagship report by the semi-fictional organisation, Studio61.

So the goal….

We generate 25 ‘tensions’ and 25 ‘practices’ and make a sick PowerPoint presentation.

We could break the report into five sections and create five ‘squads’ of people (our volunteer ‘trend hunters’) responsible for each. These could be themes like ‘playing’, ‘planting’, ‘clothing’, ‘living’ and ‘working’ (or come up with punchier names).

Then we publish and make available to anyone with the password.

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We will brain dump to get started…

Video games are probably going to start getting cool in a useful way. I just saw that one of my favourite subvertiser’s has made a fun game called Asset Manager: Asset Manager Quest

It’s a narrative game. It uses branching dialogue paths with retro styling.

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I’ve been experimenting with sound production using the Native Instruments ecosystem. It’s a sprawl of musical genres, synthesisers and distortion effects. It is a fun experience!

Perhaps we can use their expansion packs as inspiration for this project: Sample packs, beats, and loops | Expansions (native-instruments.com)

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I would love to hear about cool platform cooperatives. The radio station NTS has great metadata that allows you to explore its music resources.