Perspective
Post-COVID trends - What influences for design?
This post was written by Markus Wild 29.03.2020, 7 days after the start of the first lockdown.
We are currently stuck at home and have more than enough time to think. The daily flow of depressing, worrying news keeps you busy, even though you gain very little insight. Thoughts run in circles or zig-zag. Time to bring some order to your own thinking.
> Directly to the Corona trend list
As an industrial designer or as a developer in general, I design with certain assumptions in mind. Assumptions that have evolved over decades of professional activity and that are reliably implemented in new products.
However, it is now also clear that our world will no longer be the same once the COVID-19 crisis is over. What will change, what will remain? The experts can't give us any certainty. So we are forced to enter the realm of speculation.
If I am now planning products - and the products planned today will almost certainly apply to a time after COVID-19 - that have to hold their own in these changed conditions, then it makes sense to be clear about your assumptions.
Making the future conceivable
The Zukunftsinstitut has published a number of interesting articles on the suspected impact of COVID-19 on our behavior. The Corona Effect - 4 Future Scenarios for the Economy and Society is just one of them that you should have read. However, I wanted to develop my own thoughts on this and looked for a suitable system.
So today I grabbed the good old megatrend map from the Zukunftsinstitut and went through all the trends. And compared them with my assumptions. A very interesting exercise.
Brainstorming: What do I think is likely?
When I imagine today (in March 2020) what the world will look like after the crisis, I can think of many small details that will probably change after the COVID-19 experience. I have simply written down my thoughts, 94 individual guesses, very individually from my specific perspective as a designer living in Germany. No claim to general validity or completeness. I am also posting this here to look back at the time of the crisis and realize how my view of the world has changed.
Why don't you do this exercise for yourself? Here is the original megatrend map from the Zukunftsinstitut. And here is my long list with my personal assumptions for the time after COVID-19 - as well as the trend phenomena from the megatrend map. (Addendum 07/21: the Zukunftsinstitut has since published several articles on the impact of COVID-19 and also created a post-Conorna trend map )
What can we do with it now?
That is certainly the more difficult part. Frankly, I don't know yet. I assume that these 94 personal assumptions will influence my decisions. Decisions in design projects, decisions for investments or partnerships. In any case, I would be delighted if we could also make these speculative observations together with our clients - for their microcosm. Our offer for a joint innovation management workshop is hereby accepted.
Supplement 1:
In connection with the possible changes in behavior assumed above, I have gained the following insight from the book "Skin in the Game" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: An intolerant minority - no matter how small - will sooner or later dominate the tolerant majority. The book gives many vivid examples of this.
