In April 2011, one of the foremost American advocates of Design Thinking (DT) pronounced it a ‘failed experiment’, and instead advocated two new concepts of relevance to designers. Given the speed with which designers both adopt and abandon intellectual trends, it’s worth asking: where do such trends really come from? How can we forecast the next one? Most important: how can we make a simple, convincing, intelligent and un-faddish new argument for design, which absorbs those merits that DT has, but which moves designers on toward a more practical and yet more ambitious practice?

Well: influential pieces of thought leadership typically begin, in design as elsewhere, as more-or-less marginal academic musings. The examples of the concept of ‘stakeholders’, and of behavioural economics, suggest that intellectual trends only gain popularity when their advantages in the subjective realm of ideas seem to be given relevance and substance by new and objective social conditions.

To forecast the next trend in design, designers therefore need to situate today’s bestsellers on ideas in a careful historical context, and subject them to an equally careful critique. That way, they can synthesize their own, independent view, the better to impose it, as best they can, on the future – rather than allow the future simply to impose on them.

James Woudhuysen is Professor of Forecasting and Innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester. A St Paul’s School scholar and physics graduate, he has a knack of registering trends before other people, and offering counter-intuitive proposals on what to do about those trends. The only things James does not forecast are the weather, the stock market, the horses and your own personal destiny.

James helped install and test Britain’s first computer-controlled car park in 1968, wrote about chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction, The Economist, 1978, identified the user interface as the key issue in the design of IT, 1981, advised a top US telecommunications operator to deliver the Web over TV, 1993, reorganized worldwide market intelligence at Philips Consumer Electronics, 1995-7, forecast today’s obsession with work-life balance, 2000, influenced UK government policy in favor of the mass production of housing, 2004.

James has been published in German, Danish, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. About the future, he has consulted or given keynote speeches for 50 of the world's top corporations.

More about James Woudhuyse: www.woudhuysen.com

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