The Shape of Trends to Come

THE GUARDIAN—Trend-spotters and futurologists have become the evangelists of the modern business world. Spend more than 10 minutes listening to their breezy uplift about what is around the corner, however, and two questions begin to well up inside you – how come they know this stuff, and how does one go about separating the wheat from the chaff? Built into the discipline, after all, is a tendency to exaggerate the shock of the new: it helps to drum up business. And by the time their prognostications have failed to materialise, it is safe to predict that most of them will have scarpered.No matter. The business of short-range futurology – that hybrid of science and intuition that reads the runes of business and consumer trends in an effort to predict what will whistle its way into the mainstream within the next 12 to 18 months – is now in high demand. So what do the crystal-ball gazers reckon will be the top 10 trends of 2008? Read article.