PiersSilentFawkesKing.....

I want to start with saying thanks to SSES and Magnus Lindkvist for giving us the opportunity to listen to Piers Fawkes. I also want to say thanks for the food and drinksJ. Piers Fawkes presentation was very inspiring, it was, with no doubt, the best presentation so far. I liked the way that he sounded professional and somehow like an idol but at the same time very down to earth and humble.

The most interesting part they he talked about and that also Kristian Cheng talked about was that you have to make the information digestible. You have to make it nice and interesting for people to read and not just a lot of data that says nothing. Some companies pay an amount every month to get all kind of trend data, but the problem is that they never use and that´s where Piers comes in the picture and makes it better and more digestible. He raps it all together in a nice package, this makes it all easier for the companies to read and to adept the trend to their company.

Another interesting thing was when he talked about communities and the effect on trends. A trend is nothing until a lot of people assemble around that trend. That’s when it reaches the communities and when the communities assemble around it, then it might become a trend, and when a lot of communities assemble around it, then it might have become a mega trend.

His passion for his work amazed me. He said that he woke up every morning at six in the morning and starts every morning with reading loads and loads of RSS links. His main aim is to give people and companies inspiration.

I would like the end this post with once again giving a big thank you to SSES and to Magnus Lindkvist. It was a very well spent two hours yesterday!

Now it´s time to have a nice after work !

Park(ing)

I just had to post this. Once again I was looking through PSFK blog. I found this really cool post about Park(ing). It´s one day celebration where participants reclaim the parking spaces to create small but engaging public spaces.

“As long as you put money in the parking meter, the space is yours, you can do whatever you want”

I think it´s a great idea, but it might be a bit dangerous….but it´s something that can be elaborated….

Now I´m really looking forward to tonights guest lecture......(PSFK)

That´s all for now....

“The most expensive spy is always cheaper than the poorest army”

Today we had a very interesting guest lecturer, her name was Kristina Cheng and she works as a professional trend spotter. It was very interesting to hear her thoughts about trend spotting and her work. Her presentation itself was very interesting, but I think it was the questions afterwards that interested me the most. One interesting question was when a guy asked her how she finds the trends. Her answer to that was that she reads a lot of books, she travels a lot, goes to a lot of restaurant, but the most important thing is not just to gather information but to convert it to something that a specific company can use. When you can do that you will get your clients, just predicting trends is not that useful but the second that you can convert them you will be successful.

The second question was about what she tells her clients when she finishes her reports, does she tell the client that this is going to happen or does she tell them this, or that might happen. To answer that she said that she gives them the information and for it to be a trend the company has to go at it, or sometimes they won’t go at it and it stills become a trend or sometimes they go at it and it doesn´t become a trend. The important thing is that the company has to make an important choice and that is choose if they are going to believe the report they have in their hands and to decide if they should go at it, and hopefully in most cases, maybe go all in. She also pointed out that this work is a lot about stomach knowledge. You can never know for sure what´s going to happen in the future, but you can do what you can to predict it and combine that with stomach knowledge and you will get Kristina’s work.

You could tell that Kristina enjoyed her work and I must say it sounded like a very fun and interesting job. So who knows, maybe in a couple of years I work on my own trend spotting firm……

Schools get in the game....

As I mentioned before I have a weak spot for video games. I was looking through PSFK when I found this interesting post about schools using video games for education. Like it says in the blogg, games are an easy acess point, where school work can meet kids in a space that they already enjoy playing in.

“If you, as a teacher, are satisfied with engaging only 15 percent of your students, then you’re failing the majority,” says Mr. Dubbels. “The big idea is to identify what students are already invested in, and that’s videogames.”

Today, less than 1 percent of the schools teach through video games. I think this number will rise throughtout the years. It all comes down to reaching the kids, and video games will definitely reach the kids. I mean try giving a kid a book with math problems and a video game with the same math problems, what will he choose? No doubt about it, he will definitely choose the video game, so why make it harder than it is. Use the gadgets that the kids love to make the education fun and I promise you that you will se results. I won´t be surprised if the 1 procent has risen to 10 procent in the next 5 years.

That´s all for now!

Serendipity..........

Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely.

What will happen in the future and what path your life will take is all up to serendipity, fate and coincidences. A couple of days ago I watched the movie “Sliding Doors” with Gwyneth Palthrow as lead actress. This movie is divided into two stories. The first one is about when she manages to catch the subway on time and manages to come early which results in catching her husband in bed with another lady. That story continues with her life after being cheated. The other story starts in the same way as the first one, she is trying to catch the subway but in this one she misses it by a second or two and when she comes home her husband’s mistress has left the building so she doesn´t know what had happen. The story continues with her life, where she at the time doesn´t know that she´s been cheated at. The plot of the movie is that it takes just a second to completely change your life and the path of your future.

This is a very interesting movie and it really makes you think. Just a second of your life can change your future entirely. Like in this movie, she was just a second away when she missed the subway and it change her whole life and her future took another direction. I think that this is why it´s so hard to predict the future, especially if your going to predict your own personal future. It´s easier to predict trends with this I don´t mean that it´s easy to predict trends I just mean that it´s easier than predicting your own personal future. I think the problem is still the same, I doesn´t matter if we are predicting our personal future or a big trend, what lies in the future is like I said before all up to serendipity, fate and coincidences.

That´s all from my thoughts from the movie “Sliding Doors”!

Ps, I can strongly recommend the movie!

The importance of the group….

The modern society is very dependent on communities. The retail companies are very dependent on brand communities. Group pressure has gotten a bigger and bigger importance throughout the years, which is both good and bad. Yesterday’s guest lecturer Katarina Graffman talked a bit about group pressure and how important it is for the companies to build brand communities.

I want to talk a bit about the change in the importance of wearing the correct brand and that it´s a result from the escalation of group pressure. When I travel 10 years back in my mind I don´t see everyone in school walking around in designer clothes like they do today. Today fashion is a very big industry but ten years ago it was important but not even close to the importance we have today. We had a lot of group pressure 10 years ago but I feel that it has escalated since then. If you visit a high school today, I can bet that most of the students are well aware of what they are wearing and what brand it is. So, we have to ask ourselves the question, where does this development come from, could we predict this coming?!

The answer to this question lies in the escalation of group pressure and brand communities. So if we should blame someone we should blame the big retail companies and their way of advertising. The big thieves are for example Nike, Ralph Lauren, Apple…and so on….and so on….Today you can get bullied if you wear the wrong brand or listen to the wrong music. I bet that the group pressures in the schools today are very high, I would say higher than ever. Is it a problem? How should we deal with it? What will happen in the future?

My first answer would be that it might be a problem in the lower ages, but I think it´s under control. So, what about the future? My first spontaneous guess would be that this will be escalating. People commit more and more to brands and connect to their communities and I think that these will get bigger and more important. To be faithful to your brand becomes more and more important and will keep going that way. The companies know this and are very smart in the way they advertise and build their communities. So, we are heading into a future where the brand that you are wearing will tell the audience a lot about you. It will also help you connect to people without needing to say a word. With just looking at each other for one second, you will know directly if you have something in common.

To summarize I would say that the future involves stronger brand commitment and bigger brand communities!

I hope these thoughts made some sense!

That´s all for today!

"The problem with the future is that it keeps becoming the present"

1. "Any useful idea about the future should appear to be ridiculous." (Jim Dator)
2. "Take hold of the future or the future will take hold of you." (Patrick Dixon)
3. "The future is clear to me. What I don't understand is the present." (Gerhard Kocher)
4. "There are no future facts." (Fred Polak)
5. "A part of our future appears to be evolutionary and unpredictable, and another part looks developmental and predictable. Our challenge is to invent the first and discover the second." (John Smart)
6. "The problem with the future is that it keeps becoming the present." (Calvin)

I was searching the net and found some very interesting quotes about the future…..

Quote 1: When someone comes up with an idea about the future the responses are always “is he alright”, “whats wrong with him” but it often the most ridiculous ideas that are the correct ones or closest to be the correct ones.

Quote 2: This goes hand in hand with what I´ve been talking about before. We must take hold of the future; we must take control and have control of what we develop. For example the development of computers. We have to make sure that we develop them in the right way, so that they don´t take hold of us in the future or like I said before so that they don´t take to many jobs from us.

Quote 4: That’s very true, there are no future facts, we can only guess and predict. We can do good predictions and good guesses but we can never be 100 % sure and that´s the beauty of the future.

Quote 6: I think that´s the best quote. We reach the future everyday and yet we have far to go to reach the future...(I promise, I´m sober J ). Time passes by very fast and It´s true that every second that passes by makes us reach a step in the future, but still there is a lot more to reach.

So, how should we handle the future….the only answer to that is to live today, enjoy the life that you have right now and handle the future when it reaches you. And last but not least, don´t take anything for granted, like I said the future reaches you every second and you don´t know what it contains.

That´s all from my philosophy side of my brain today……!

The Foresight Group....

Last night’s guest lecture was very interesting in many aspects. The surrounding we sat in was very cozy and relaxed which was a nice change till all the classic lecture halls. When Björn Larsson started to talk he felt very fatherly. He had a nice and humble voice and really reached out to all the students in the class. He started to give us an assignment which contained that we had to search our sole for the last big change we had in our live. That was a very odd thing to do in an entrepreneurship course, but the content was reached. He summarized it all with saying, if you are looking for a change or need a change then you should think of the last time you had a change and try to find the foundation of that last change to reach a new change.

The next speaker was Fredrik Karlsson who is the CEO of a company called Twitch Health Capital. He said two very fun and interesting things. He said that there are two special occasions where we decide to make a change, New Years Eve and on Sundays :). There is a gym in Stockholm that sells their most membership cards within six weeks after New Year’s Eve. He also mentioned that the average member goes to the gym four times a year, no wonder that the gyms give monthly payment plans.

The most thoughtful thing he said was…

“If you’re going to have a personal change then you need to prepare, don´t rush it”

That´s something I think you should have in mind when entering the future. We should take it easy, we should take the time we need when we want to do our changes, we should think one extra time before we act. If we do this, I think we will enter a more safe and adaptive future.

Gustaf Delin (co-founder of The Foresight Group) had a nice comment as well….

“Why make it simple when you can complicate it beautifully”

Last but not least I have to mention the last ten minutes of the lecture. It felt like we were touching the future when Björn called his associate in Capetown (?) in South Africa and allowed him to give a short speech and answer some questions via Skype. I have never had a lecture before where the speaker was sitting in another continent. Is this the future, well no, because it has already happened. But what should we expect in the future. Will all the teachers sit at home and deliver their lectures, or will we sit at home and listened to the lectures, or will there only be one big university in the entire world who gathers the best teachers and gives lectures to the students on their computers? I mean, imagine that you can sit in Stockholm and still go to Harvard or Yale, wouldn´t that be great?! That´s something to think about, how will the school system be in the future, how will the schools look like in the future and how will the lectures be in the future…..??!!

A spontaneous answer would be that it will stay the same for a long time. This is such a big institution that would need a lot of strong factors to make a change. On the other hand I do believe that lectures through the internet will become more and more popular and I also think that maybe in the future you will be able to attend any school in the world by just sitting at home pressing the keyboard on your computer, but who knows???!!!!....

That´s all for today…..

The Child Within.....

I have a confession to make. Even though I´m 26 years old I still have a passion for video games, and that passion will never go away. You can never get to old for video games. I was sitting at home with my friends on Friday evening playing my latest purchased video game console called Nintendo Wii. When I was playing this new game a started to think about trendspotting & Future thinking. This Nintendo Wii is a new and revolutionary game. It ´s revolutionary because of the way you play the game. You have a sensor bar on top of your TV that connects with the sensor bar on each of the controllers. Instead of just sitting down in the sofa and pressing some buttons you have to do the movement by yourself that you want your guy on the TV to do. So in other words, if you want your guy to swing the golf club you will have to do a full swing yourself, then the sensor bar senses how you swing the club, and "voila" your guy makes the exact swing. This is the first game that contains this kind of motion sensitive controller. This made me thinking about how fast the video game development is going and made me wonder where we are heading.

The first video games reached the markets in the late 70`s and early 80`s. They were very simple but still big. I mean look at the fist Nintendo console. The console was a big box, the games were as big as a DVD cover and the controllers were attached with a cord and they had 2 main buttons and two extra buttons and a steering button on the left hand side. It was very simple back then, the graphics were very bad but at that time it felt revolutionary. After the years have gone by the video game development has exploded. There are many actors on the market that are competing over the customers, this forces the companies to invest more and more money in the development section to keep up the pace with the other companies.

So, what´s the next step in the video game era….?

Predicting the future is never easy, especially not in this fast-paced world of video games. But I´m going to make an attempt. Nintendo Wii is a kind of trend that has started in the video game industry. But you can say that there are two trends that have started. One of them is the motion sensitive controller that has opened up gaming for people who wouldn´t normally play videogames and the other one are the mainstream mature games. Quiz games for grown up people, music games that both kids and grownups can play. These two trends will last a while.

Another thing that keeps getting bigger and that also opens up gaming for new people are the low-commitment games. These are games where you don´t have to read a 30-page manual. You can spot this in the Nintendo Wii, where they have a retro section where you can download old games to your new Wii. You can for example download Ice Climber that was released in the early 80´s that was very popular and easy to play. I think that the future will contain more and more games where you can “feel” the game and where you can “move” realistic to it.

The future will also contain a bigger network where you don´t have to invite your friends to your home to play against them, instead you will for example only need to connect to facebook or something to play against them. This is something that exists today, but I think it will get bigger and better. Last but not least, I think that all the games will disappear. That sounds very bold, but what I mean is that in the future I think that instead of going to the store to buy I game you just pay directly online and download the game.

That´s all for now!

Focus on what´s difficult.....

Last Wednesday I sat in ”svarta havet” and listened to Henrik Blomgren. He said one very interesting and thoughtful sentence. He said, focus on what´s difficult and not what´s easy. With that he meant that everything that´s easy is already done or thought at. With this I don´t agree. I think that the big inventions are always the easy ones. Don´t you recognize yourself when you open the newspaper and you read an article about some inventor who invented something easy and got rich, then you keep saying, why didn´t I come up with that. I think that the problems why some people can´t think of any great ideas are often because they think too big or too difficult. I would say, think of what´s easy and make it better find out what´s missing. Except that interesting sentence, I didn´t feel that Henrik Blomgren made any big contribution. I hope that are next guest will give me something better to blog about.

That´s all for now!

Bigger, more expensive and more.....

When I yesterday sat on the subway travelling home from konstfack reading Aftonbladet, I came across a relatively interesting article. The name of the article was “bigger, more expensive and more” (in Swedish: Större, dyrare & fler) and it was written by Susanne Nylén. She starts the article with telling the readers that there is a book called “Top 10 of everything” that is celebrating their 20th anniversary. To celebrate their anniversary they have made lists where they compare some facts from now and then. The lists that they have included in the article are “The biggest film budgets”, “The biggest cities”, “The biggest airports” and “Mobile phone users”. The numbers are very interesting.

The biggest film budget
Then 1. “War and peace” (1967) 655’’ sek

Now 1. “Pirates of the carribbean 3” 1967’’ Sek

The biggest cities
Then 1. Tokyo (1988) 23 322 000

Now 1. Tokyo 33 600 000

The biggest airports
Then 1. Chicago O´Hare (1988) 53 338 056

Now 1. Atlanta 84 846 639

Mobile phone users
Then 1. USA (1988) 1 230 000

Now 1. China 500 000 000

If I start to analyze this numbers I get a bit scared. I mean just look at the mobile phone users. In 1988 China wasn´t even on the top ten list, but today they have over 500 million users. What will happen in the next twenty years? There will definitely not be the same expansion, I would say that it would be impossible. One of the categories that I think might keep on going is the biggest film budget category. The movies get more and more expensive and I think that they will keep going in the same pace. Why do I think that? The stars demand more and more money and all the extras in the movies costs more and more. Everyone wants to have the biggest and best and also the most expensive movie. But as I mentioned in my last post there must come a time where the top is reached….but the big question is WHEN……!!!!!!

That´s all for today!
I´ll be back soon!

The end of the designers......

Like I said in all my other post is that I think the computer will take over more and more. One interesting aspect to look at is the “self-service” part where you design the things you buy yourself. Today it is possible to go into different sites and design your own product and then you just press “buy” or something. Then in a couple of weeks it will be delivered to your home. Just look at the shirt industry. There are sites (for example...www.tailorstore.se/) where you go to where you just type in your measurements, what colour you want and you can even design the shirt yourself, then you just hit the “buy” button and the shirt will appear at your home in a couple of weeks.

Will this development be the end of designers?..... I really hope not, but I think that the amount of designers will decrease. There will not be space and jobs for all the designers that are employed today. We are heading into a phase where people do a lot of things by themselves which means that there will be jobs that will disappear. Will people have time to do everything by themselves in the future. I predict that the “self-service” part is increasing rapidly today, but some time in the future we will reach a peak and realize that there´s not time enough to do all the stuff by ourselves which will result in a downfall of the “self-service” part. This will result in less jobs in the near future but as time goes by will come back to where we are today…..

Here´s my own little prediction graph over how much we will do ourselves in the future......

That´s all for today!

A miniaturizing world....

Today I had the opportunity to listen to Nicklas Bergman. He had some very interesting thoughts about the future. There were three things that he said or showed us in the class that caught my eye and ears. The first thing was something he said. He said that the world is changing to a miniaturizing world. Everything keeps getting smaller. When you give it some thought, you realize that it´s true. I mean just look at cell phones, I mean compare a cell phone today to the phones we had ten years ago. You can fit ten of the cell phones today in a cell phone ten years ago. Another example is the music industry. Before we had big LP discs and today we barely have any disks at all, today it´s all about mp3 players.

The second thing that was something he showed and commented. It was a graph which showed how smart a 1000 dollar computer is compared to the human brain today. The graph also showed in what year a 1000 dollar computer will be as smart as one human brain and last but not least it also showed when a 1000 dollar computer is smarter than all brains in the world together. That was a very scary graph, especially that there might come a time where one 1000 dollar computer can be smarter than all human brains together. This goes hand in hand with the thoughts that I´ve had in my earlier posts. So it seems like the computer is going to take over in one way or another. It´s only up to us to take advantage of that in the right way. With the right way I mean that we should develop and use it in a way that it won´t take away too many jobs and become a negative effect on the society instead of being a revolutionary invention.

The third and last thing that caught my eye was a picture of a beer bottle in the future. The cool thing about this beer bottle was that the bottle itself contained a self chilling system. You could choose what temperature you wanted the beer to have. That wasn´t all, it also contained an alcoholic measurement system which enabled you to see how much you had to drink and you could see if you were in the right state of mind to drive a car. I think we that we can save a lot of lives if all beers in the world had this function, but at the same time, a function like that would raise the prize for beers a lot. I´ve tried to find the picture that Nicklas used, but with no luck….

Google search....

294 000 000......

What does this incredibly big nummer mean? Could it be the nummer of ants in all forests? Could it be the number of votes in all idols competitions in america throughout the history? Well, the answer is the number of matches on Google when you search for the words "the future"... :) I´m sitting on a Saturday evening, a couple of hours before party time and the only thing that I can think of is blogging and trendspotting. The last words that I can remember from Magnus was "don´t go and search for the future on google"....so that´s what I did, just to be a little contradictory! On the top ten matches I found a very interesting site, "Life in the future 2010 and beyond" (http://www.alittlehistory.com/future.htm). I found a small post that was very interesting and made med think a little. It brings me back a bit to my last post in my blog. This time it´s not about vending machines, it´s about computers. That made med ask myself the question, when will a computer be as smart as a human being, and when can a computer do all the things that a human being can?

"In time, more advanced computers will be able to be creative, respond to feelings in a feeling way, develop intuition, recognize patterns, and suggest innovative alternatives." (http://www.alittlehistory.com/future.htm)

I think there is something important to this. I believe that in some time in the future the computers will take over more and more. I believe that we will have som kinds of robots in our homes. I strongly believe that computers will be able to respond to feelings and as the quote says develop intuition. This goes hand in hand with my last post, are we heading to a world with less personal assistance that will be replaced with machines and computers? Like I said before, I really hope not. I also think that this is something that we should be aware of even today. If we develop the computers in the wrong ways we will end up with a high unemployment rate. So to summarize todays weird but not useless post I think that we should keep up the good work in developing high tech computers but at the same time be aware of what will happen if we develop it on the expense of human resources!

Well that´s all for today, and no, I haven´t been drinking yet, even if it might seem so :)

Where are we heading?

What will happen in the future and what does it contain? The fun part with a question like this is that nobody will give the same answer, nobody knows what will happen in the future. People will have similar thoughts about the future depending on where they come from and what beliefs they have, but I still think that you can´t find any two people that have the exact thought of the future. We can only gues, hope and predict but nobody can know for sure. The good part about that is that nobody is right and nobody is wrong. I will in this blog for a couple of weeks discuss the future. What I think will maybe come in the future or what things that wont last in the future. I will also give some thoughts about trends, so....enjoy!

I scrolled through som blogs to get som inspiration for my own blog. I got really scared when I looked in the retail section in the springwise blog. There was a post about a vending machine that sold electronics. I have only seen vending machines that contained candies and drinks. But i didn´t think to much about that and keept on browsing through the pages when I once again stumbled on a vending machine. This time it was a vending machine that contained sneakers. I thought to myself, how in the world can you buy sneakers from a wending machine?! After that post I keept looking for more vending machines. I got curious, how many crazy vending machines are there. After a while I found everything from umbrellas to hair straighteners. This made me wonder if vending machines is the future in retail. Is the future, machines, where we don´t need to have any staff at all? Is the future a shopping mall full of vending machines? I really hope that it wont come to that. Nearly all retail stores need the personal assistance. How fun would it be to walk around in a mall with only vending machines standing everywhere.

That´s all for today!

My eyes slowly opened!

Today, september 2:nd, I had my first lecture for the semester, but it wasn´t an ordinary lecture, it was a lecture where the teacher forced me to open my eyes. I sat on the subway travelling "far away" from Handelshögskolan and wondered, what have I signed up for...Then Magnus (our teacher) started to talk, and it didn´t take many minutes untill I realised that this wasn´t an ordinary SSE course, this was something else. Magnus with his convincing and passionate speach over how fun, different and good this course is made me realise that this can really be something fun and useful. Then after an hour when the lesson was over my excitement rate had risen from 0 to 100. So to summerize the first impression of the course "Trendspotting and Future Thinking" I would say that it´s gonna be a fun 7 weeks with high expectations (from me :)) but also at this stage a head with a lot of questionmarks over how to open my eyes in the right way!