Top 10 Trendwatching Blogs
If you want (or need) to identify the Next Big Thing, these blogs will take you beyond your usual news sources and use networks of coolhunters to find out what's happening tomorrow. Different sites focus on different trends; while some follow fashion and music, others squeeze the entire globe's culture in an effort to spot emerging trends first.
This daily update on the world of ideas and products is run by three writers with extensive trend-watching experience, avowedly driven not by commercial standards but by "what we like." Tends to cover streetwear, design and technology with frequent excursions into food, furniture and photography.
Cool Hunting's slightly less fashion-obsessed cousin. Features an increased focus on architecture, transportation, public art and signage, and an extraordinarily designed high-end butcher shop in Sydney, Australia.
Sure it's in Italian--but there aren't a lot of words on this site, which focuses on cool design, music and other trends from around the world. Don't worry, photos and video clips from the worlds of art, popular music, food and other fields abound, and you may even pick up a bit of Italian as you page through it all.
PSFK is a New York-based trendwatching and ad agency that follows the latest changes in culture, from package designs and marketing to interactive headstones, African digital art, global architecture, and a 1988 VW Scirocco that's been retrofitted to run on coffee grounds. Check out their blog for a daily dose of what's next.
A sort of informal Web-based think tank for FullSIX Group's designers, marketers and strategists. Focuses on how ever-faster communications are changing culture, design and economics, with much comment on the evolution of Google, Facebook, Twitter and other social-media technologies.
Fueled by 32,000 members worldwide, this site posts dozens of items indicating directions the zeitgeist may take each day. And it's participatory: You can become a member and join the fun--and maybe make a little money if you're good at trendspotting, since TrendHunter shares the revenue.
Focuses primarily on advances in home design and architecture. The first place to spot bleeding-edge products such as flexible bathtubs that adjust to your body, compact toilets for extremely cramped spaces, ceramic photo tiles that assemble to picture a waterfall, and more that's about 80 times cooler than what you'll see at the local hardware store.
Another great foreign-language trend site, this time in French--but as with IwantTOrideMYbicycle, language doesn't matter amidst copious photos and video of the hottest trends around. (Most captions are in English.) Focuses on innovative design, especially in automobiles and architecture.
Trends in mobile hardware and social media, especially smartphones and Twitter, from a marketing-research firm. Gathers data from interactions with social-media experts and mines it for meaning and predictions about the future.
Trendwatching consultancy that puts out monthly Trend Briefings as well as videos highlighting their findings about where the culture (especially Web culture) is headed. Warning: Catchy titles such as Transparency Triumph, Nowism, Foreverism, and Innovation Jubilation are likely to pull you in.
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