Assingment: Trends Cockpit

The assignment, Trends Cockpit that I followed was about trends. It was about: What are trends, what are the trends, how to spot trends, how to find trends, what to do with trends and maybe the most interesting one "How to be a trend". We tried to answer all these questions after we visited the world’s largest retail fair, EuroShop in Germany. On this fair you were able to find the latest trends in the field of:

  • Concepts, what kind of shop concepts are there and what possibilities are there to furnish your shop.
  • Sales, new marketing methods, strategies and products.
  • CIS, new retail technology.
  • Expo, trends in shop design, stand construction and events.
  • We also did some little exercises to help us find answers to these these questions. For example, there was an exercise where we needed to design a shopping window from the perspective off a certain designer, in our case Piet Hein Eek.

    One of the first things which I learnt about trends during the first meeting was that by just only looking at certain events in areas such as society or the environment you are able to predict a lot of trends for the coming 10 years. However, these trends/predictions are not really specific, but more off a direction the (design) world will go to. It would be very tempting for a designer to focus on these trends, because you would be one of the first in an area to come up with an interesting concept so it will most likely picked up by a lot interested parties. I don’t prefer this kind of design thinking, because it is too far in the future for me and to vague. These predictions could also change every day due to certain circumstances. That’s why I found out that I prefer 3 – 5 year trends to work with. These trends are most likely to stay the same during this period, there are in most cases already some new technology involved around this trend and you are sure that you don’t work long on the same problem. I don’t like working long on the same problem. It has to be interesting all the time to motivate me too keep working.

    Another new insight which I gained after visiting the fair was that you can look at products at different layers. Layers as shape, color, material, user experience or user interface are some layers where you can think off when looking at a product. You are able to learn more from a design when looking at the product in different ways. I noticed that products, which I believe, are "good" in all kinds of different ways such as function and user experience, were often also the more interesting designs. Becoming aware of this fact that is the most valuable insight I gained as a designer during this assignment. As a designer you need to look at the whole picture to create a good product or service.

    During the last meeting we had, we all presented our assignment we got the lecture before. We had to design a display of shop like it was a designed by Piet Hein Eek himself. We made a scale model of our shoppin window and presented this during this meeting. After the presentations we had to combine two different designers together and do the assignment again in 5 minutes. By doing this we learned much about the designer from the other team, because we need to take the most important elements from the designer to get to a design which will show both designers identities. We closed this meeting with a discussion about the designer which was about two different types designers, the theoretical designer which would work under a brand such as Samsung and the "design" designer, which would work on many different products at a design studio as Frog design. I definitely want to become a design designer, because I love to work on all kinds of different products and services. Different products and services also requires all kinds of different approaches which keeps things interesting, fun to do and fun to explore, which I think is very important.

    This assignment was fun, interesting and helpful. One of the most useful insights I gained was that I realized to look at products at different ways. That knowledge is something I really could use during my Milano trip (5/04/14 t/m 12/04/14). The visit to the retail fair was also a good warming-up for the Salon die Mobile. I now know what to expect and how to get everything out of it. The discussion about the two types of the designers was.