Hello friends, readers, and legions of followers. I've organized a panel in consideration of SXSW 2011, titled
A Guide To Long-Term Perspective On Trends. The synopsis is below; I'd be entirely thankful if you were to follow on over and click the thumbs up vote as hard as you can.
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.
Thanks for considering this concept. The team at SXSW had nice things to say about it in their confirmation letter; I agree with their sentiment and the sentiment of the commenters thus far that it's a discussion that we could all stand to be a part of. I try to speak to this briefly in the above - most SXSW attendees and readers here are all quite savvy when it comes to staying abreast of daily culture and hot items of public interest. But there's also deeper value in being able to pull out long-term patterns from analysis of these nanotrends, driven by an understanding of how humans fundamentally interact with each other and their technologies that is grounded in historical consistencies.
This is organized as a dual-panel discussion, which leaves room for fascinating friends of PSFK who have identified interest in sharing their great insight on long-term perspective. We're looking forward to this as an exploration of value, as it applies to seeing past the hype and excitement of near-term nanotrends into capturing a deeper socio/techno-cultural understanding of how people interact in the world.
Update: Timely enough, Seth here has just shared some thoughts on this exact subject, in characteristically pithy fashion; do read on, if you're interested: Resilience and the incredible power of slow change
