Our American Guest, PSFK

Once again the course revealed glorious its atmosphere performance with Piers Fawkes, A successful and famous blogger and trend spotter. I kinda enjoyed today’s class. The whole class was very interactive. After the class of Christina Cheng who is also a trendspotter and a successful entrepreneur, this class one hand clarified and strengthen my thoughts behind trend spotting as carrier. From the following slide you can also have a clear idea:

From the above snap shot what PFSK is doing as trendspotter company is quite strait forward. PFSK has a good trend spotting team whose job is to check newspapers headlines and RSS links on the co-relation among creators, communities and companies. Based on this research they blog and publish bulk of articles.

Throughout the whole lecture Piers Fawkes set examples to present the big OOO. He mentioned creatOrs are like the individuals and small groups intent on creating art & culture often leveraging digital tools. Fon instance Blu’s Stop Motion Video or
LocoMatix game where the end user are actually creating the concept. Whereas cOmmunities are larger groups who are interacting with art & culture to evolve it. Examples came like sleeveface, music riff sharing, etc. Finally the third O is the cOmpanies who are working with creators and the community to develop new products and services. Etsy.com, Threadless, 20x200.com are some of the names that appeared. If you see the connection among these O’s you will be able to identify the practical implication of trend spotting practice in daily life to make a better world.

At last after the lecture ended, snacks were there and all FREE. May be I should not call it as snacks; I could see it as a full meal as it was quite heavy and delicious. I looked around and felt the whole class turned into a party like atmosphere. So, today we had a great class and a short party and the thanks goes to Magnus and Caroline for such an wonderful evening.

For those of you didn’t know about his background, what kind of work he does, you can check this short video where he talks briefly on what kind of work he does.

You can also check "The Trend In Trendspotting" in PFSK website. There are couple of popular articles like;

Start Your Own TrendWatching Unit - The TrendWatching team seem to be more content in encouraging you folk to do the trend spotting yourselves rather than find trends themselves.
10 Rules For Trend Watching - Grant McCracken directs his weighty thinking to Trend Watching and defines 10 rules for trend watching.
List Of Trend Aggregators - Over on IF! Ozgur Alaz has kindly created a list of trend aggregators showing what's hot on media, shopping trends, lifestyle and changes in digital lifestyle.
more at http://www.psfk.com/2007/08/the-trend-in-trendspotting.html