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A Guide To Long-Term Perspective On Trends

Event Interactive 2011
Format Dual
Organizer Kyle Studstill – PSFK
Description This discussion will inspire attendees with the means to observe short-term phenomena through the lens of long-term perspective. Many savvy SXSW attendees follow immediate-term trends as part of their daily business; this level of trend includes new technologies/platforms & hot items of public discourse. Just beyond this level of trend exist short-term microtrends, which help explain the 2-5 year impact of immediate-term trends by highlighting patterns that emerge through analysis of individual manifestations. Understanding these types of trends is indeed important, but this discussion aims to illuminate how these short-term patterns fit within long-term sociological narratives that span decades. These are difficult to see manifest, and it is even more difficult to consider how they might impact long-term value when making decisions about the near-term. Attendees will leave with insight on why long-term perspective is valuable to anyone hoping to design tools that speak to fundamental human truths. The concepts of "revolution vs evolution" and change blindness play important roles in our story, as considerations in capturing perspective on present-day developments. This discussion does not aim to teach attendees how to predict future trends. Instead it will provide the tools for thinking about micro-level manifestations within a macro-level scale of historical development, as a way to better think about potential implications for the future.
Questions
Answered
  1. How can trendspotters better contextualize emergent behaviors/trends within larger sociological shifts?
  2. How can we use longer term narrative arcs to help us identify which trends 'matter' and which do not?
  3. In defining what matters, how can we better sense when some trends are actually 'ingredient' trends that will combine with others to more deeply impact the future?
  4. How do fundamental cognitive biases manifest in the notion of change blindness, and how can we avoid these traps?
  5. How does long-term thinking help explain seemingly counter-intuitive real-world examples of social media behavior?
Level Intermediate
Category History of Technology
Tags patterns, Perspective, Trends
HELP