Morning Walk #16
Highlights from the best annual forecast of 100 trends to watch in the coming year
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In this issue
Highlights from Future 100 Trend Report
Some interesting things I read/watched/listened to lately
📝 Highlights from Future 100 Trend Report
Every year around mid-January, I fiercely wait for a trend report that I consider the best one. It’s made by the Wundrenman Thompson agency. The Future 100 examines a hundred trends across ten categories to watch in the coming year.
I highly recommend you to spend 30-60 minutes going through each of them, but today I wanted to highlight some of my favorites.
Microforests
Dense microforests started appearing in parking lots, backyards, and urban parks.
In London, Islington council announced plans to appoint a tree specialist for every housing estate at the end of October 2021.
Only when I turned 33 I realized how nature affects your mood, creativity, and overall well-being. I want to live near trees and forests now, but giving up on the city’s infrastructure is hard. Microforests might get our concrete jungles a little closer to nature.
Carbon-neutral browsing
Volkswagen reconstructed its Canadian website for a more sustainable browsing experience in February 2021. The Carbon-Neutral Net online redesign shrinks the brand’s digital carbon footprint by removing all color and replacing photographs with mosaics created from low-data text characters. The project has significantly lowered the amount of CO2 generated by browsing. The site produces an average of only 0.022 grams of CO2 per page view, compared to the average website, which produces 1.76 grams of CO2 per page view, according to an assessment by digital carbon emissions calculator Website Carbon.
I knew eco-friendly websites were a thing when I first saw Low Tech Magazine Website (the website runs on a solar powered server, and goes offline during longer periods of bad weather). But this seemed more like an art project. Volkswagen’s project appears to have more real-life promise and might become something bigger than just a PR stunt.
Finite Social Networks
What if social platforms had fewer, more curated posts instead? This is where Minus comes in. The platform, created by Ben Grosser to challenge existing social network models, only allows users to have 100 posts for life.
Thursday is a dating app that is only live on one day of the week. Launched in May 2021, the company was created to counter online dating fatigue.
I wonder what restrictions can you install on your users to promote healthier and more mindful habits? I love restrictions and limits in products, I believe they do lead to healthier usage.
Adaptive packaging
This is more like accessibility packaging, actually. This photo blew my mind:
After looking at this photo, I realized that you need to have a completely different approach to packaging most of the time to suit the needs of people with disabilities. I’m so used to designing inclusive digital interfaces that I completely forgot about other aspects of user experience.
Audio healing
Sona is a new music therapy app for anxiety that launched at CES 2022. “We're on a mission to validate music as medicine,” Sona founder Neal Sarin tells Wunderman Thompson Intelligence.
I haven’t tried any of these myself yet, but it sounds intriguing.
5G healthcare
Telemedicine is on the rise. But right now, telemedicine means having video calls with your doctor. But is there a way to enhance the experience by utilizing 5G? In theory, it could help us implement something like remote patient monitoring, and even remote and robotic surgery assistance. A lot of innovation is coming to telemedicine, thanks to 5G.
The great reskill
New professions emerge every couple of years now, and the traditional education system can’t keep up. This is one of the reasons we see this massive rise of EdTech. Previously you went to school for 4 years and worked for 40. Now you’re going to have to learn some sort of new skill every four years.
👓 Things I’ve been reading/watching/enjoying
Q1 2022 Gumroad Update
Sahil Lavingia is broadcasting openly what used to be board meetings and investor updates for Gumroad but are more like quarterly updates for the whole product. Great chance to look at how one company makes decisions on what to focus on and how to communicate that to customers and stakeholders simultaneously.
What if your phone could let you know why people are calling
Some guy on Twitter sketched out a fun feature for the iPhone that would let you know the reason for someone’s call. Gosh, that would have been lovely to see implemented for real; I hate regular phone calls.
BlueSky Ventures: The Entrepreneurship Mindset
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania has a free interactive game on their website that lets you play as a prominent business analyst at a VC firm. You need to evaluate startups and decide where to invest. Exceptional execution with a mockup video calling app, email client, and presentation app.
That’s it for today. Thanks for reading. Until next week 👋🏻
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