Martha Cotton: Accenture Interactive’s “Fjord Trends 2022” Outlook
The Fjord team is optimistic about the year ahead. All images courtesy of Fjord.
The process for Accenture Interactive’s global annual “Fjord Trends” report begins in the summer when the team’s 2,000 plus designers across 40 offices begin sharing their ideas. Everyone submits what they’re thinking about the world and what that means for humanity. Think of it like a global mood board.
Over the next six months, the most intriguing ideas are pitched in calls from Dubai to Johannesburg to Dublin (and more) that happen at all hours of the day and night. Then the best of the best themes are vetted by Fjord’s editorial team for patterns. Only then does the final list crystalize and the full report comes together.
This year, they include re-examining our relationship with everything (from technology to our employer), the coming metaverse, how to think about trust as a competitive edge, building care into more organizational experiences, and designing for scarcity.
Here, Martha Cotton (above), global co-lead for Fjord and co-editor of Fjord Trends 2022, discusses several of the trends investigated and uncovered in this latest addition, along with ideas for how businesses can act on them in the year ahead.
The End of Abundance Thinking?
“It has the question mark at the end because we're not sure. This one speaks to the new models of scarcity. Many people have lived with scarcity in their lives, but more and more people have been confronted with shortages—workers, distribution channels, austerity laws, right? It’s straining the thinking we’ve had for several decades about abundance. The call to action is around designing for scarcity and learning that having less of something doesn’t have to mean ‘loss.’” Maybe innovation isn't about the new but about rethinking how everything comes to be? It pushes us to think about where things come, how we create things, and how we can repurpose the old for the new.
What’s Next? A necessary mindset shift will be to decouple innovation from the notion of “new.” It’s often said that people have to change behaviors, but this is hard to do when they’re constantly being influenced otherwise. For sustainable behaviors to stick, brands are going to have to think differently...Rethinking our default setting of abundance is an important first step.
This Much is True
“Centuries ago when humans looked at the world around them to try to explain the phenomenon, we called that magical thinking. That gave way to scientific thinking in later centuries. Now, because we're still examining the phenomena in our world, we are still asking questions. Google has been around for 24 years and it has evolved people's experience with questions. We just get to ask more and more and more and more questions. And our stance towards the answers is fluid. The big call to action here is around how to establish trust and to think about trust as a competitive edge. The number of channels through which to ask questions has grown exponentially. We think about our clients need to figure out how to establish trust so that when the questions are answered, they are building a relationship with whomever is asking. We might think about of this as a North American trend, but it’s playing out globally.”
What’s Next? As brands strive to answer people’s questions, they should make strategic choices about which information layers to deploy and how to design them across touchpoints to build trust...Increasingly, brands will compete with one another on information layers. Granular design decisions will have direct strategic implications, expanding the remit of designers’ work. In fact, tasks related to information layers will span the whole organization, especially brand, marketing, customer service and operations.
Handle with Care
“I can’t tell you how many of our colleagues sent us evidence about mental health and well-being. We are talking about mental health more openly in the workplace, from managers to employees. We used to say every business is a healthcare business; now we’re saying every business is a business of care. Organizations must build care into how they engage with both their employees and customers. At Accenture, for example, we hired a Chief Health Officer. Especially in the context of the great resignation, benefits that support employee mental health, such as flexibility around where they work, are attractive to people. These will be built into benefits packages.”
What’s next? Looking ahead, infusing kindness and compassion for others is a business opportunity that design can help with. There are many ways to create new value in caring through design: expand accessibility, prioritize mental well-being and safety, explore multisensory design to boost inclusivity, and take a fresh look at the detail of the employee experience...Care has always been an important part of being human, but the difference is that it’s now more visible and openly discussed—a welcome change. Designers and businesses alike need to make space for practicing care—it’s not enough to talk about it. The aim should be to deliberately design and build care into systems.
If you’d like to read more from The Creative Factor—such as Morten Bonde’s story about reinventing himself as a LEGO Art Director while losing his sight or Edése Doret: Inside the Mind-Boggling World of Private Jet Design—sign up for our newsletter.
