👶✨The Nexialist #0193trendbaby | rebranding trend research? | kerfuffle | deep doubt era | (non)conforming in 1982 | smorgasbord | 6 feet pole | snobbery vs. spicy | architecture of the invisible
welcome to another week of cyber-physical flâneuring, the nexialist
hey, you! i hope this message finds you (or at least your last two brain cells) skipping like the gif above. this week, the nexialist got a shoutout from Maria Clara Villas, who runs one of my favorite newsletters from Brazil, Galáxia, and many new people arrived with that, so welcome everyone and get ready for some brainsparks 🥰 this week, you get a mix of irl and url references, from shifts&trends and new words i learned, to shifts in fashion and taste, to the power of choreography and dance. enjoy! 🫀✨ 1 year ago » 🦝✨The Nexialist #0141 : the art of saying nothing | how individualism undermines systemic change | žižek vs woke-ism | queer health | got me started | grok | a dweller on two planets | lemuria | a conspiracy of lemurs 2 years ago » 🕸✨The Nexialist #0089 : iranian girls and women | evangelical missionaries x indigenous people | nuda | spray-on dress | that girl | unholy | millenium 3 years ago » ⚙️✨The Nexialist #0040 : Lollygag | A Measure of Sacrifice | Solarpunk and the End of Capitalism | Dark Solarpunk | Antiwork 👶trendbaby
last week i had the opportunity to attend the trendwatching event in amsterdam. it’s the second time i join them at the beautiful eye museum and enjoy a day full of inspiration and provocations. the biggest theme this year was AI, of course. it was great to see the excitement paired with critical thinking. AI can do a lot of great things like helping independent workers like me to leverage their skills and organize their work life, like the M.E.O trend. or pushing us to reject the algorithmic oppression and prioritize serendipity like in the ‘age of imperfection’ trend. BUT do we really need ai for everything, especially because it’s so energy intensive? does my company need to release an ai product because everyone else is doing it? and let’s not use ai to deceive. i was proud to see my friend gustavo in the panel bringing a more ecological and long-term perspective to the table, as well as Michell Zappa’s talk about autonomous futures. i’ve been following trendwatching’s work for so many years, and i’ve always enjoyed their view and methodology on consumer trends, which gives a structure and set of questions to work with when looking at trends.
now i have a trial do their platform amplify, where you can find use cases and analysis, toolboxes, reports and lots of great stuff. they also released their trendbaby tool, which has a free version. trained on their data, you can input the information about your business, sector, with trends from their repertoire, audience, innovation type and timeframe, and it spits out innovation ideas which can serve as a starting point. brainsparks: 2024 trend reports (tn#151), polyfutures (tn#158), life trends 2024 (tn#147) 📈rebranding trend research?
Dimas Henkes shared this link, which caused a bit of a kerfuffle in the trends group we’re in. julia kakhalova-chi asks: ‘is it time to rebrand trend research?’ when a tiktok core/fad that lasts a week or two start being called a trend (remember namecore?), then a “trend” has lost its meaning. julia calls it semantic inflation —community, influence, authenticity, content… all of these were victims of that same process.
but this is tale as old as time, years ago we had to make distinctions of what a fad was, a hype, something going viral, a meme. macro-trends, micro-trends (are there nano-trends?) i mean, remember when clients asked: can we create a viral? 🙄 these are different concepts and might even have overlapping aspects, but even working in the area, their meanings start blurring. but it’s good that we exist, so we can keep ourselves checked and help our clients filter through the noise. they all have their importance in this business that we do. i think including memes in social listening, for instance, should be a common practice, but not the only one. i love Matt Klein’s social_commentary series, “a reading of our memes — theorizing what they say about the zeitgeist — an expression of collective truths.” i also love Elodie Marteau’s hoardiculture series, where she plays with the process of collecting signals— “hoardiculture: collecting so much junk there are piles of random shit cluttering everywhere possible and then claiming it’s a cultural trend.” protein agency also has a series of reports, dirty words, that aim to reclaim these words that suffered semantic inflantion. these examples show how it’s part of the “trend research” craft to question and play with these semantic shifts. it is important to explore how these terms are changing, and their role as tools to help us understand the pulse of culture. julia suggests cultural insights as a way to define what we do, and it’s actually the one i feel most comfortable with. (mental note to start saying that at dinners, instead of the usual trend research followed by disclaimers that i’m not working at a consultancy).
brainsparks: trends are bullsh*t. long live the trends (tn#190), namecore (tn#71), hoardiculture (tn#191), meta trending trends '24 (tn#158), 2024 trend reports (tn#151) 🫠kerfuffle
Michell Zappa from Artificial Insights used this word when we were chatting before his amazing presentation about autonomous futures at the trendwatching event. and now i’ll be adopting it. brainsparks: lollygag (tn#40), interrobang (tn#188) 🤔deep doubt era
i’ve been noticing in my whatsapp family groups some ai-generated images: from good morning messages with flowers to the baby catwalk. it all seems harmless, but i do think there is some harm: it normalizes ai-generated images and might make the less media literate to lose track of reality. remember when we (almost) fell for the pope in balenciaga? in this article by benj edwards he talks about the era of deep doubt:
he also talks about cultural singularity, a new term and idea for me:
in the efforts of being propositive, edwards helps us with some media literacy tips
brainspark: synthetic media (tn#18) 🧑🎤(non)conforming in 1982 messy nessy chic shared this timecapsule from 1982 youth:
it’s uncanny how this is 42 years old, yet the world seems to be the same, but also not. some questions are quite contemporary. while women are questioning the aesthetic pressures on them, and some question how they should not be judged by the way they dress, wearing jeans to work was not acceptable. also it’s fun to see the fascination with subcultures, still present today. brainsparks: gen z subculture (tn#91), counter-culture x counter-futures (tn#10) 🇸🇪smorgasbord
another word for my vocabulary mentioned on the video above. 🐾6 feet pole i just learned about safe mind, the project of Augustus Muller of Boy Harsher & LUCY - Cooper B. Handy, and i’m loving this. it’s an 80s-synth-punk-indie-groovy kind of situation, if i had to label it. it made me simultaneously headbang and shake my ass. wait… is the this a mix of the 6 feet under and the 10 foot pole expressions, maybe saying they’re (not) playing with death? brainsparks: boy harsher, electronic body music (tn#84) 🌶️snobbery vs. spicy
messy nessy also shared this npr link: How Snobbery Helped Take The Spice Out Of European Cooking. living in amsterdam, this explains a lot of things… it also shows how snobbery and classism move trends, in this case (and probably many others) for the worse (yes, i’m judging). a fascinating read, that shows how taste changed along centuries.
brainsparks: warmer climate, spicier food (tn#145), methexis in darkness (tn#85), cosplaying as poor (tn#62) 🐠architecture of the invisible this weekend juan and i went to the hague and it was super inspiring. juan got a new tattoo, we went for a walk, saw the dior exhibition at the kunstmuseum and watched three dance performances under the title architecture of the invisible, by NDT, Nederlands Dans Theater. all the performances were fascinating, but i’ll focus on their new piece that got me almost going in a trance: christos papadopoulos’ ties unseen. 16 dancers moving together (video above) like a school of fish, with a hypnotizing synchronicity to the music. to me it’s always impressive the memorizing abilities of dancers, and in this case it was 16 of them, never leaving the stage, working in unison. i could see one or another wandering a bit further, or doing slightly different or even opposite moves. it got me thinking how current it is to do a piece that has no solos or duets, prioritizing the group over the usual “couples” or individuals. i got chills watching it.
after the show, i had the opportunity to talk to christos and some dancers and i had to share my impressions with them. christos said that he encourages the dancers to go beyond the structure of the choreography, as breaking the rules is part of the routine. barry, one of the dancers, said in this piece he’s tapping more into a kind of swarm intelligence, rather than a storyline or emotions, which is a different channel than usual. i’m still thinking about that. brainsparks: the hidden networks of everything (tn#126), lines of desire (tn#171), art predicts (tn#1), scenius aka communal genius (tn#31), bronfenbrenner's bioecological model (tn#85) see you next week, trendbabies 👶✨❓Wait, what is a Nexialist?🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻🔌Let’s Collab?I truly believe innovation comes from bringing improbable areas together, and that’s why I called this project The Nexialist. Some sectors are known to be self-referencing and hermetic. Sometimes, teams are on autopilot mode, focused on the daily grind, which hinders innovation. As a Nexialist, I like to burst these bubbles, bringing references from different areas, and maintaining teams inspired and connected to the Zeitgeist. I offer inspiration sessions called Brainsparks, creative desk research (Zeitgeist Boost), Plug’n’Play deals for workshops and sprints, and other bespoke formats. If you want to know more about this, send me an e-mail with your challenge(s) and we can figure something out together. Check out my website and some work I’ve done below: You're currently a free subscriber to The Nexialist. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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👶✨The Nexialist #0193
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