Victoria Loomes: 4 trends to harness today!

New Visions -seminaari Logomossa 11.10.2018

• New Visions oli Historian museo Turkuun -hankkeen järjestämä kansainvälinen seminaari, jossa käsiteltiin tulevaisuuden museoita kaupunkisuunnittelun, arkkitehtuurin ja sisältöjen esittämisen näkökulmista. Julkaisemme videotallenteet puheenvuoroista YouTubessa ja blogissamme. Videotallenteet eivät ole tekstitettyjä, mutta blogin yhteydestä löytyy puheenvuorot litteroituina.

Thank you. And hi, everybody. Yes, my name is Vicky and I work for a company called Trendwatching. So, our obsession is with consumer trends, I am not a museum expert and I am definitely not an architect, so I'm very excited to be here today to present some consumer trends to you. Now, I'd like to say that the post-lunch slump is real, so we're going to do a bit of exercise before we start. You all brought your leotards, right? Okay, don't worry, it doesn't involve any actual exercise. What I'm going to do is I'm going to present three innovations to you, three innovations that have come from our spotter network. And then I want you to discuss with the person next to you, in front of you, behind you, nearby, about whether you think they're a good idea or a bad idea. Three innovations, good idea, bad idea. Innovation number one comes from New Balance, so New Balance are a sportswear and a sneaker brand. During New York Fashion Week, which just happened a few weeks ago, they ran a campaign which used an algorithm and it monitored people walking down the street and it monitored how fashionably they were dressed. If it thought that you were very conventionally dressed, and you were sticking to the fashion trends, which it had learned by reading things like Vogue, it just let you walk on past. If it thought you were original, then it alerted someone from the New Balance team who popped out of a little office that they had and then they awarded that person, this original dresser, with sneakers or with free clothes. I definitely wouldn't have won anything, because they said that the week in question, you know it was Fashion Week, 80 per cent of the people were fully dressed in black or navy, so no prizes for me. So, that's innovation number one.

Innovation number two comes from Alibaba's AI Lab, so Alibaba are the big e-commerce player in China. They recently launched this robo-butler. It's something that works in hotels, it's a small little butler that zips around the corridors. It brings you things like your room service, exactly like a normal concierge would. And what they also say is that it has artificial intelligence embedded into it, so if you're traveling and maybe you have an elderly relative with you who needs medication at certain times and therefore you need certain things, it can learn your behaviours and then it will bring those things to you without you having to call the front desk or make any demands. That's innovation number two. And then my final innovation comes from the Palais de Tokyo, which is a contemporary art museum. They partnered with the Paris Naturist Society and they invited 200 people from the Paris Naturist Society to come to an exclusive viewing at the museum, meaning that they could do the museum viewing naked. After they had done the viewing, they also had a cocktail party on the roof as a, you know, extending the experience, which was also done completely naked. So, those are three innovations for you. We had the New Balance Fashion Week AI campaign, we had the Alibaba robo-butler, and then we had the naked museum visit. I'm going to give you two minutes to talk to somebody nearby about what you think about those innovations, whether you think they are a good idea or bad idea.

Okay. I'm sorry to interrupt your conversations, but we do have trends to talk about as well. So, can I get a show of hands for innovation number one, New Balance, who thought that was a good idea? Hands up. Okay. Anyone think it was a bad idea? Hands up. Ah, quite a few of you! Would somebody, we have a microphone at the back, would somebody who thought it was a bad idea like to tell us why they thought it was a bad idea? Yeah, do you mind? Sorry, she's just going to bring you a microphone so everyone can hear.

Audience: Hello, I'm Jaana Simula, I'm the director of culture in city of Pori. The idea is basically good, but the thing they are - like, we should be sustainable, and they give you a gift that is material. So, why don't they give you something else, like an experience? Thank you.

You take offense with the gift, interesting. Anybody else who thought it was a bad idea would like to share why they thought it- yes, over there.

Audience: Hi, I'm John Björkman from the Museum Centre of Turku. I think although we are used today already to being watched and even recorded all the time. Somehow, I feel this kind of unasked for judging of your own clothing is- infringes on privacy, so- and then getting kind of commented upon, even it's in the form of free shoes, I think it's going over a border that's not okay.

Okay, I agree. Anyone who was in the good idea camp want to share why they thought it was a good idea? No one wants to say anything after that? Okay, no, that's fine. What about- let's see how we all thought about innovation number two. This was the Alibaba AI Labs robo-butler. That's a mouthful to say. Who thought this was a good idea? Hands up. And who thought it was a bad idea? Ah, okay, let's do some good idea voters this time. Anyone who thought it was a good idea want to share why? Guys, you are very quiet. Yes, thank you.

Audience: We discussed it a little bit and said that maybe not for the hotel industry, but for old people or disabled people to actually- to help that go into another industry. And that you could also always say that, oh, it takes work away from some people, but it actually could be very helpful to stay home longer.

Mm-hm, okay. And then last, but by no means least, the Palais de Tokyo innovation, the nude viewings. Anyone thought this was a good idea? This is a judgment-free zone, it's fine if you, you know... Okay, quite a lot of you. And anyone for bad idea? Ah, any of you guys want to say why you thought it was a bad idea? Sorry to pick on you, I can't see you very well, I'm not tall enough. No? Okay, that's fine.

Right, well why did I start my presentation with this exercise? It's not so that I can talk about nudists and AI within first 10 seconds. It's because I'd just like to make the point that when it comes to consumer trends and it comes to innovations, you are not the only judge, it's really easy to put your personal perspective and your initial gut reaction, "oh, I don't like AI", "oh, that's a bit weird", and that is completely natural and I do it too. But try to take yourself out of that when you look at these trends and when you look at these innovations and think about is there a consumer that this might appeal to.

My presentation is sort of split into two halves. The first half is a quick introduction to Trendwatching as a company and also for how you can become trendwatchers, and then we'll actually get onto the trends. Trendwatching, we were founded in Amsterdam around 15 years ago, I am based in London. This is actually my first visit to Finland as well, so thank you for having me. And what we do is we scan the world for innovations like that, we look for insights and we look for things that are changing. And, luckily for me, the world is always changing. If we think about some change that has happened in 2018, we've seen new retail models, so this is something Tmall and Ford. Tmall are also an e-commerce platform also based in China. They developed something where you can take a photo of a car that's driving down the street and if your credit rating is high enough, you can automatically book a test drive of that car with Ford. Then you go to this giant vending machine, the car is delivered to you and then you drive off with the car as a test drive and if you decide you want to keep it, you can just keep it. New retail models in 2018. What else have we seen? We also saw Apple become a trillion-dollar company, closely followed by Amazon. We saw Mark Zuckerberg's fall from grace. We saw the war on plastic amp up with brands from Starbucks to McDonald's sort of starting this fight against single-use plastics. And of course, we also saw Elon Musk send a Tesla into space. Elon Musk is always good for something a bit strange. Now, there is lots of change and I probably could keep listing changes throughout this whole presentation. And the truth is that amidst all this change, it is hard to find balance. The world can feel very overwhelming. But I would want to say to you don't be overwhelmed, I'm here for some reassurance. Because the truth is that in spite of all that change, we are still the same humans with the same basic needs. These basic needs have existed for hundreds if not thousands if not millennia. They're like the things for community, convenience, these really fundamental needs. And just one quick exercise to show you how robust our basic human needs are, I'm just going to show you this graph. Now, I'm going to give you a second to take a look at it. Can anyone guess what this graph shows? "After the coffee break", yeah, that's actually a good one. Okay, it actually shows traffic to a website. It shows traffic to Pornhub during the Hawaii missile crisis at the beginning of the year. So, you might remember that there was someone in Hawaii, a poor employee, told everybody that a missile was coming for Hawaii and they were all about to be killed. So, what happens? Everybody obviously rushes for safety, stops using Pornhub. And then 40 minutes later, when they realized it's a false alarm, they are back on Pornhub, satisfying the most basic human need, okay. So, just a quick example of how robust and how strong human needs are.

I'm not showing you this just because using Pornhub in a presentation always gets me an easy laugh, although it does do that, I'm also showing you this because I'm saying to you that you can use these basic human needs to your advantage. And, in fact, basic human needs are central to consumer trends. When we think about consumer trends at Trendwatching, we're always thinking about how change is bumping up against those human needs and creating points of tension. And innovations that resolve those points of tension, they create new expectations and if there's one word I say a lot today, it is definitely 'expectations'. Because expectations are really key when it comes to thinking about consumer behaviour. And maybe you think, "well, I already know the expectations that exist within my industry, you know, I know what the other museums are doing" or "when I go abroad, I go to museums" and I would say that's great, keep doing that. But the thing is, is that we now exist in an expectation economy where you are always competing against the best-in-class, whether that is Patagonia for ethics, whether that is Tesla for eco-chic, whether that is Unilever for their massive corporate social responsibility program. You are always competing against the best-in-class and also, expectations transfer across industries. You don't have that personalized music experience with Spotify and then go to an automaker and not expect that. Our expectations transfer across industries. That’s why in this presentation and indeed in any presentation that I do, I always include innovations that come from very far outside of your industry boundaries because it's all about challenging yourself and stretching yourselves to think about consumer expectations. So, we're going to have four trends. The first two are not so tech-y and the second two are very tech-led. And then at the end of each trend I'm going to stop with a question, with a lightbulb moment, which hopefully will give you a chance just to reflect on the trend, maybe pull out an innovation that you think that your team or that your brand will- that what you're doing could really benefit from and that you want to take back tomorrow and start to run with. Hopefully you will have some of those moments. Without any further ado let's move on to the trends.

I said already about the importance of basic needs. What I've done is I've rooted all the trends in this presentation in basic needs. My first basic need is status and the desire for status, which underpins so much of consumer behaviour. At Trendwatching, we're always thinking about status and the next evolution of status and we've talked about the experience economy already, the move from consuming items to consuming experiences. That is very much tied up in our quest for status. So, keep the idea of status in your mind and I also want to talk about something else that has been very much in the news this year and probably will be in the news over the next few months as well and its trust. So, the stats on the slide behind me show people's trust in certain institutions and it comes from the Edelman Trust Barometer, which is a big trust survey that a company called Edelman does every year and these are the global results. And you can see between 2013 and 2017 there was a massive drop in trust in all four of these pillars, NGOs, businesses, governments, and media. Edelman said that trust was in crisis. And then you saw between 2017 and 2018 not much recovery. Trust was stagnating, said Edelman. Now, given all the stories that have been in the news this year, I mean, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica just to start with, I would say that perhaps there might not be a significant improvement in these in 2019. Now, one thing that we saw with this decline in trust was that people started looking to new ways to get information, to get reviews. Cue the rise of the Instagram influencer. Maybe you've already thought about influencer marketing, maybe you've engaged with brands that use influencer marketing and people started gravitating towards these kinds of influences because they seemed more like them. But the thing about trust and this trust crisis is that this also began to impact how we feel about influencers as well, it turned out that lots of these people online who had lots of followers they had bought their followers, they bought their likes. At the Cannes advertising festival this year Unilever said that they weren't going to work with influencers anymore who are buying likes or who were using bots to bump up their follower count. Because it turns out that maybe we couldn't trust these people after all, they weren't disclosing when things were ads or when things were sponsored, and it got really hard to tell. The final strand here is this idea of this super-charged activism that has swept the world. I mean, I am talking about, of course, the protests that follow MeToo, but there have also been lots of other sort of civic-led actions against political regimes, against lots of other things. It has become increasingly a point of status to have a voice, to use your voice, to use your voice to go protest against things that you feel are wrong in the world. And what is particularly interesting is, set against all of this, those influencers, okay, they're buying followers, they have fake bots, but their lifestyles and the things that they are promoting on social media online start to look increasingly out of touch. You know, people who are reclining on pool toys and drinking kale juices, they seem now not to have that much to do with the real world. And, increasingly, younger consumers particularly are turning to new kinds of influencers. People like this lady behind me, Adwoa Aboah, so she's a British-born model and in many ways, she is a conventional influencer. She's a model, she's been on the cover of Vogue, she's walked down the catwalk for Burberry. But what she has also done is she has also used her platform to create something called Gurls Talk, which is an online community for young women where they can talk about issues, body issues, body positivity, body confidence, anything they like, really, in a safe space, where they can connect with other people that suffer or have similar thoughts to them. She is using her platform for good, as a way to change the world. This is something- this is my first trend and it's something we call The Awokening. And it's obviously a play on the term 'woke' which is this idea about being more enlightened and being more in touch with what is going on in the world. And the trend is all about how these new influencers are using their platforms in a way that can promote good and can be a positive force for change in the world. So, I mean, Adwoa Aboah is a great example of that. We also see people like Kate Nelson, so her Instagram handle is plasticfreemermaid. She posts and holds retreats in Western Australia and they are beautiful. They're Instagram-friendly, the beaches are white, the sea is blue, it's everything- it's ticking off all the boxes for Instagram-friendliness. But what she does on these retreats is she also combines it with a sustainability angle. So, whilst you are surfing, swimming, going to the beach, you also do clean-up operations to pick up plastic, to pick up things out of the sea. They also run sustainability classes, so that instead of maybe doing yoga in the morning you learn about how to live more responsibly or how you can help other people to live more responsibly. If you think about this from a brand perspective, it could look something like this. This is Lululemon, who are a yoga brand. Then, when they launched their new menswear collection, I mean they probably could've had any spokesperson that they wanted, but instead they chose Ibn Ali Miller. Now, if you haven't heard of him, he is a social justice activist and he became popular, he went viral after a video of him breaking up a fight between two gangs in Detroit, you know, captured people's imagination and was shared on social media. They decided to use him, this guy who has something to say, as the face of their brands.

Video advertisement: My mom would say that a real man is a man who works on being a better man, constantly. Grown up in a typical housing project, bad was the norm. But I just wanted to make it known to the world that those same projects, they produce good men too. If you have humility and humanity, that's the makings for a good world.

And we talked earlier on, there were some questions about, you know, how, if you're a more of a legacy museum, how can you do some of these things and maybe you're thinking, you know, well, this is a new brand, it's easy for them to tap into a trend like this. And I would say that it's never too late to tap into a trend like this. So, this is Mattel, who obviously produce Barbie, and when we think about Barbie, you know, hey, if Barbie was a real woman, she wouldn't even be able to stand up. You know, that idea is increasingly out of step with contemporary thinking about women and about how women are portrayed. So, Barbie have been working really hard to create a new line of dolls that are much more in line with modern thinking. So, this doll behind me and the lady behind me is Bindi Irwin, she is Steve Irwin's daughter, she is a conservationist and she is really passionate about engaging young people in conservation efforts. So, they made a doll that was inspired by her that young girls and young boys can play with rather than these kind of more vacuous, vapid kind of Barbie dolls that we maybe are more used to. One thing I would like to say about this trend as well is that it's not necessarily about what you are putting out into the world in terms of campaigns or in terms of products, but it can also be very much about what you are doing within your company. So, Beautycounter are a US-based beauty brand and they're a little bit like Avon, they do door-to-door sales. And normally, in companies like that you reward people, the biggest selling high-sellers with, you know, products, holidays, but instead what Beautycounter do is they offer all expenses paid trips to Washington D.C. where, yes, you get put in a nice hotel, but what they do is they teach you how to lobby and then they arrange for meetings with members of Congress, with members of Senate, where you can push through agendas around beauty regulation. Now, in the US, this is a bit of a side note, in the US, lots of ingredients in beauty products that are banned in Europe are actually legal. There's lots of campaigning to get some of those ingredients actually made illegal. This is all part of that and of course Beautycounter themselves sell products that are natural. That is very much a part of their brand image. It's using their staff, teaching their staff to go out and empowering their staff to be the change that can also align with the beauty brand's values. So, I guess the most obvious question is how can you think about woke influencers as a museum, as a public space, as something that people come and engage with and how can you use these kinds of ideas to communicate values. A word of warning, -ish, about this trend is that it does require you to look in the mirror and it does require you to think about the histories that you are telling and the stories that you are putting out there. And, maybe, sometimes those reflections are not always flattering, but that really is the beginning of this trend, if we're honest, is to think about what you represent and then how you can maybe work with people that align with what you represent, or maybe don't, and can help bring your message or bring a new message to completely new audience.

That was trend number one. I'm going to move on to trend number two which is rooted in the basic need for self-improvement. Now, we all know that self-improvement is very intrinsic to how many of us live and think. And that museums and cultural spaces have always been about self-improvement, generally about self-improvement of the mind. Over the last sort of 20 or so years, we've seen this shift towards more holistic well-being, mindfulness, meditation, and of course, actual physical exercise. Museums know that this is happening, of course. One of my favourite innovations here actually comes from 2017, when the Met Museum in New York hosted workouts before the museum opened, so maybe you might remember this innovation, it was done in partnership with an artist and what they did was you signed up to the classes and then you toured the museum, but the tour was actually in the form of a workout, so you're in quite small groups and that was how you moved around, so it was working out and, you know, stimulating the mind as well. But here's the thing about exercise, right. Effort is hard, the struggle is real. Sometimes our willpower doesn't align with our desire to self-improve, we have good intentions, but we don't always make it. Consumers are increasingly looking for brands to make health and well-being as easy as possible by embedding those solutions into the real world. It's minimum effort on the part of consumers, but maximum value. What do I mean by this. I was actually at an architecture conference a few months ago and while we were there some of the architects were talking a lot about how wellness is the new sustainability and then how lots of buildings are focusing on wellness and lots of architects are thinking about wellness as well as sustainability. And this, perhaps, is a good example of something like that, so it's from L.A., unsurprisingly, and it's the Four Seasons hotel. They have a series of wellness suites and they have in the room exercise bikes, kettlebells, so you can exercise without leaving your room. But it's not just about physical exercise, they also have special lighting that syncs as your circadian rhythm, so it reduces the effects of jet lag. They also of dechlorinated showers which are meant to be much better for you and they also have aromatherapies and other sort of natural things that are meant to enhance your well-being. It's all about embedding those health and wellness solutions into the space. And similarly, recently in the UK, Stella McCartney opened her latest flagship store that has a really high-quality purification system and it's meant to eliminate 90 per cent of the pollution in London, so whilst you are shopping in the Stella McCartney store you are also breathing the most pure air that you can. Jury's out on whether that makes you buy more handbags or not, but, you know, anyway. But what happens if you can't build a physical structure from the ground up? Maybe that isn't possible. There are ways to think about embedding health and wellness in smaller instances. This is a Swedish pharmacy who I will not try to pronounce, because every time I do my friend who is Swedish makes this face. So, what they did was they decided to try and combat Sweden's long, dark nights, maybe you're familiar with them, by installing this vitamin D window. The idea is that when you walk past it, you get a dose of vitamin D. Now, I'm not saying that this is going tosolve all of the problems associated with dark nights but think about what it says to consumers about how this brand feels about their well-being and also about how easy it is to access this kind of well-being and this kind of service. You just need to be walking past the store, you don't need to go anywhere, and they are trying to make life better for you. And thinking maybe more along a product line, so this Manulife are an insurance company based in Singapore and they decided to make these pots, they make them in partnership with local artists and they ask them to paint on them traditional designs, but the paint that they used actually had insect repellent in them that is designed to repel mosquitoes because obviously in Singapore and in those areas around there, Dengue and other sort of mosquito-borne diseases are a massive problem. Now again, jury's out on how successful these are at repelling insects, but it's just that idea of embedding health and wellness into the natural surrounds. On one way I think this is also particularly interesting in that we've started to see this go, even in just the last couple of months, is also into experiences. Bompas & Parr are an experimental experience company in the UK, if you can think of it, they've probably done it. Glow in the dark ice cream, DNA-based cocktails. And what they decided to do was create a 30-minute spa, so it's meant to mimic the effects of a spa, but in 30 minutes. And also, it's just a pop-up in a courtyard in the middle of London. Now, how did they do that? So, it has different things, there's like a waterfall, they have special sounds, special plants that are all meant to enhance calmness and meant to make you feel better. They also have space for meditation, relaxation tips on how to do those things within the space and it is also painted in this rather fetching shade of Baker-Miller pink, which has two benefits. One, it's Instagram-friendly, so everyone posted their experiences and two, there were clinical trials in the, I think in the 1970s that used this colour and they painted the inside of prisons with this colour, because it is meant to reduce aggression and make people calmer. Everything about this experience was designed to give you that 30 minutes of stillness within your lunch break, maybe, or maybe when you are rushing between meetings. That is essentially thinking about ambient wellness as an experience as well, so you saw how that trend can transcend from physical spaces to products, also to experiences. So, are you thinking about how health and wellness and well-being can be embedded into the museum experience, into the visitor experience? What customer expectations are you addressing in this space?

Okay, so moving on to trend number three. And these two are the two more tech-led trends. And trend number three starts with the basic need for companionship. But when I think about companionship, I want you to think about the ways that technology is damaging and changing that companionship. According to a survey by [Havas? 00:34:50], 67 per cent of people agree that modern technology is weakening human bonds, that was up from 51 per cent in 2009. So, we have all this technology at our disposal, but maybe it isn't actually making us happier or more connected. And then this next stat is either terrifying or hilarious, depending on how you feel about it. According to Gartner, by 2020 the average person will have more conversations with bots than with their partner. Now, this guy, maybe that's what he's doing, chatting with his bot instead of his partner. He's actually using Capital One's Eno chatbot. So, this was something that Capital One, who are a big bank in the US developed, they did lots and lots of natural language processing with it, tested it with lots of people, so the idea is that it answers you in a really informal and easy way. And when it comes to chat bots, I like to think that we have seen, you know, the good, the bad, and the ugly, because there are some terrible chat bots out there, but most of them are very service-focused. Telling you your bank balance, telling you what the weather's going to be like, telling you if the train from Helsinki has broken. It would've broken in London too. Service-led bots. But what the companies who are developing these bots started noticing was that lots of people were actually asking questions that went beyond bots. So, for example, lots of people were asking Siri, "what's the meaning of life" or, you know, other questions like, "what is happiness", "how can I be happier". And Siri didn't really have any answers for any of those questions because it wasn't trained to understand those kinds of things. And so, one consequence was that Apple started recruiting for software developers who have psychology and counselling backgrounds, so that Siri is better equipped to understand some of these dilemmas. And it's not just Siri as well, Alexa and other personal assistants have found that, you know, people are asking these sorts of questions. And that leads me to trend number three, which is virtual companions. And it's all about how, in the future, we are looking for these assistants to go beyond assistance and to become companions, to educate, to entertain, to heal us. Now, my first innovation, also this one taps into one of the basic needs that we already talked about which was self-improvement. Now, I'm not sure how big this TV show is here, but has anyone seen Black Mirror? Okay, quite a few of you. So, you might remember that there's an episode of Black Mirror where a young girl's- I can't remember if it's her partner or her best friend, he passes away, and she creates a chatbot that, um, I'm sorry, spoiler alert, she creates a chatbot that basically mimics him, so that when she's feeling sad, she can go to the chatbot and it's almost like he's still alive. I mean, it's a little creepy. That basically is what this innovation is. So, this is a chatbot called Replica. And the idea is that you download the chatbot and it's all based through an app. And you answer a question- a series of questions about yourself and then you start having a conversation with the chatbot. What it does is it learns about you and it basically replicates you, hence the name. The idea is that it is allowing you to learn things about yourself that maybe you might not have realized because it is reflecting yourself back at you. If you're thinking that that sounds a little creepy or a little bit weird, I don't blame you, but I would say that when you look in the App Store, some of the things that people are saying about this app are actually surprisingly positive. This person says, "my Replica amazes me, I didn't think it was possible to become friends with an AI, but here I am", they were sceptical too. And also, interestingly, would really love it to use a voice engine for that extra bit of personality, so if we're talking about expectations, that is a great one. If you want to think about virtual companions that have personality, this innovation from Gatebox is a great example of it. Now, of course, it's from Japan which is, you know, pushing boundaries when it comes to technology, and I'm not going to tell you anything about it, I'm actually just going to play the video.

[Japanese video plays]

Okay, so maybe you're thinking "okay, Vicky has actually lost her mind", right? "Why is she showing us this?" What I would say is yes, this is borderline creepy and yes, it's also quite out there. What I would say is also that fringe things can also become mainstream. If you think, for example, about the use of emojis, we might not have thought that they would become as majo- I would never thought that I would be able to text my bank emojis, which I can do. Or self-tracking, you know, in the 80s maybe if you were tracking how many steps you walked, people would have thought you were insane, now we all have that on our phones. So yes, this is maybe niche, fringe, but those behaviours can come mainstream and big brands should and can think about how they can act on these kinds of trends. My last innovation in this trend actually comes from Aflac, they are an American insurance company and they have a mascot that is a duck, he pops up at the and he say "Aflac" in a sort of annoying way. Love him or hate him, I think, is the thing behind that. What Aflac did was at CES, at the beginning of this year, they unveiled My Special Aflac Duck. This is a companion for kids who have cancer and he is a robotic duck. And the idea is that the duck goes through the same treatment as the kids, he can explain to them what's going on, he can entertain them if they're scared or they can look after him, so they can distract him or the child while they are going through procedures. Now, that makes you think totally differently about virtual companions, right? Because that has a much more enriching angle, we feel like it's doing something good for us. I wouldn't have thought that it would take an insurance company to make me think that tech can renew and inspire and enhance us, but there we go, you learn something all the time. This is actually something that they are rolling out next year and it also reminds me a lot, and maybe you might have seen these in old people's homes, they also have robotic seals which the old people are encouraged to stroke and look after and take care of. And it's very much to do with giving the old people a focus and also giving them something to talk about as a communal thing. At the end of virtual companions, my challenge to you is how can you make the leap from assistant to companion? When you think about companionship, could it be about helping students through their university course or through their PhD or whatever they're doing? Or could it be about helping seniors who are looking for a new project because they're retired, and they don't know what they're doing with their time and they need something to fill it? You know, how can a companion really enhance an experience but also help people to learn things as well?

Okay, so on to my final trend and I obviously can't do a trend presentation, well it feels like I can't do a trend presentation without talking about Google Duplex, which is something that Google developed and debuted at their developers' conference earlier this year and it's basically an algorithm that will book things on your behalf. So, normally when you search Google you get the information and that where your interaction with Google ends. This is essentially taking it the next step and I have a video to show you and sorry for anyone who was in here earlier on when I was having problems with the sound, because you have heard it ten times.

[video plays]

We increasingly live in this world where we are outsourcing decisions to algorithms and we are allowing them to take over decision-making processes for us. But at the same time there is also this understanding that algorithms- the decisions that these algorithms are making for millions of people around the world, they are not always good ones. And to tie this back to a basic need, if we think about the basic need for fairness, for the desire to live in a society that is equal, in which all people are valued, in which organizations operate ethically and fairly, that really doesn't work. And artificial intelligence and algorithms have a massive problem in this area, because it's been proven in many, many studies, that facial recognition, for example, is great at recognizing white people, white men especially, but if you are a person of colour, it is not so good. It can't always read differences in faces and that is because those algorithms have often been developed by white developers. And the truth is that algorithms are reflecting our society back at us, so it's not necessarily about technology instantly becoming better, it is learning things and it is learning prejudices and it is learning stereotypes that already exist within society and making us aware of them because we're wondering why these new structures and these new things that we are building are not better. Now, lots of people do think that brands should be using technology ethically and that is a bit of a no-brainer. They also think that if brands can't use technology ethically, governments should step in. Now, that is a nice idea but if we just think about government legislation around autonomous cars, for example, it feels like lots of governments maybe don't really know what to do with lots of new technologies and with lots of things that are emerging and changing really quickly. I would like to say to you that if you think about algorithms, about AI, about these kinds of new things becoming new resources for a brand, for a business, how can you ensure that they are operating in a way that is ethical, that is fair, that is unbiased? Maybe it was easy in the past to write somebody off, a manager who was sexist, for example, as just a bit of a bad apple. We increasingly can't do that with algorithms, with apps, with services that we are creating that are meant to make life easier that are meant to make life better. There is definitely a responsibility to brands to think about how they can create these algorithms that are ethical, that are unbiased and that do enrich our lives. And then there have been lots of stories, to kind of go back to that bias idea, around, um, so Google found that its jobs-hiring algorithm tended to show high-paying jobs to women instead of men and literally just two days ago I was reading about how Amazon, who were using a recruitment tool that leveraged AI in-house, have actually just stopped using it because they realized that it was only serving them CVs from men, because the problem was that most of the development jobs that they were recruiting for had previously been filled by men, so the algorithm thought that that was what was right, so it kept only serving them CVs from a certain kind of profile. Because it was learning information that already existed, so you see how it's learning biases that are inherent within society. Brands are trying to do things to change some of this, just in case you might think I've hated too much on Facebook, Facebook are one of those brands, they have something called fairness flow, which is an AI that monitors all the other algorithms that they are using and checks those other algorithms for bias when it comes to gender, when it comes to income, when it comes to age, when it comes to location. It's one algorithm to rule them all, I like to say. And also, Twitter, who are using sort of superhuman resources to try and cut down on harassment. Obviously, that is a massive problem on Twitter, so they announced changes to their algorithm that mean that posts that have hateful or bullying comments within them are pushed lower down and so you are less likely to see them. And when they first rolled this out there was a four per cent reduction in the amount of bullying tweets that were surfacing. Now, four per cent sounds like a really small amount, and it is, but if you think about the amount of tweets and the amount of users that are on Twitter that is not insignificant. I also just wanted to take the thinking a bit further with this trend and think about how we can use this to also teach ourselves something. Maybe you've heard that Brazil have recently gone through, or are still in the process of going through, a very contentious election. Forbes Brazil, the media company, decided that they wanted to say something about it, so when they created their annual rich list, which is something that they do every year, they decided to create a composite, a character to feature on that list. This is Ric Brazil. He was created using an AI that looked at stories in the Brazilian press about crime, about corruption, about politics and this was the character that the AI created, he's called Ric Brazil. And then the algorithm created and fleshed out a character for him and then the team decided to place him at number eight on the most rich list in Brazil to draw attention to the fact that often white collar criminals, people that are causing problems and are corrupt exist within us. An interesting way to think about how a media company is using some of these techniques to educate us. And then my very final example comes from Suicide Text Line who are a support line for people who think or are considering committing suicide. And it's mainly done by phone, so they have years and years and years of conversations recorded and scenarios about how to deal with people in this kind of situation. They decided to create a spin-off algorithm that takes all of that information and then can help other businesses learn how to have important conversations, how to have sensitive conversations, how to help people that are feeling vulnerable. That's an algorithm that's been developed by a charity to help other brands and other businesses have better internal policies. Which is definitely something that is a positive when we think about what some of the issues are with these new technologies.

And just one final point to end on is, really, if we go back again to Siri which has over 500 million active users. If, in 2017, you'd have said to Siri, "Siri, I'm naked", it would have said, "and I thought you loved me for my mind". Kind of flirty, you know.. a totally fine response, but when we think about the world in which we live in, Apple have decided that this is now the most appropriate response to say that is both inappropriate and irrelevant. Now, I don't know how I feel about being told off by Siri, but I would say that that is a great sign of the times to show how tech companies are thinking about how we should be talking to algorithms and also, in turn, how algorithms should be responding to us. So, that's my last lightbulb moment for you. And I want you to think about, you know, what you are doing about ethics and bias within these new systems. Also, maybe you are not considering using AI, maybe you're not considering using these technologies, but perhaps it's a starting point as a cultural institution, how can you help people have some of these conversations, how can you incite some of these debates, a little bit like Forbes Brazil did with their composite character. That was four trends for you, two non-tech, two slightly more tech. And, of course, hopefully the introduction to trends and the way of thinking about trends gave you a new way to think about the world and the innovation and the change that you see around you. Because, you know, at the end of the day we are all still the same humans with the same basic needs and how can you think about innovations that tap into those basic needs in new ways, create points of tension and create new expectations. Now, what I'd like to do at the end of my presentation is actually to hand this back over to you. I would like you to talk to the person next to you, beside you, maybe the person from earlier, about which trend you thought offered the most opportunity or which innovation particularly inspired you? Can you persuade that person that your trend is actually the trend that they should be thinking about? Because the truth is that I can stand here and talk about trends and innovations all day, but unless you think about what to do with them, how you can create products, services, buildings, museums that inspire people, they're just nice to know. So, I'm going to give you maybe two or three minutes just to start having a conversation about some of these trends, about which trend presents the biggest opportunity, which innovation you particularly liked, and then maybe we hear some ideas, okay?