plain wrong come from. Non-obvious trends don’t have apparent industry biases and are not gratuitously self-serving.
Use Authoritative Sources. When it comes to the examples and research that you find to support a trend, the more authoritative sources you can find, the better. What this means in practice is using examples that people may recognize or finding research from reputable organizations or academic institutions. These sources can make the difference between selling your vision or having your audience question your conclusions because they don’t believe your sources.
Let’s bring the five elements of the Haystack Method to life through a step-by-step analysis of how the process helped define a trend from one of the past reports.
The following description takes you through all five steps of the Haystack Method to gather, aggregate, elevate, name, and prove a single trend from the 2015 Non-Obvious Trend Report: “Engineered Addiction.”
Case Study: How to Curate a Non-Obvious Trend
Engineered Addiction
STEP 1—Gathering
One of the earliest stories I saved, more than a year before this trend was published, was about Dong Nguyen, the creator of mobile game Flappy Bird, which became one of the most downloaded apps of the year in 2013. After millions of downloads, Nguyen suddenly removed the game from the iTunes and Android stores. In the interview I had saved, he shared how his unusual move had fueled a consuming worry that the game was negatively affecting people’s lives because it had become “addictive.”
His unexpected choice seemed significant—though I wasn’t yet sure exactly why—so I saved it. Months later, I read a book called Hooked, by Nir Eyal, which explored how Silicon Valley product designers were increasingly building “habit-forming products” that seemed to describe perfectly what Nguyen had unintentionally done (and felt so guilty about). I saved that idea, too.
STEP 2—Aggregating
At the end of that year, I began the process of aggregating ideas to start to identify trends. This was the moment where I started seeing a pattern in examples that seemed to focus on some type of addictive behavior. The Flappy Bird story was about game design that seemed to lead to addiction. The book Hooked was about product design and using it to create addictive habits in people. As I grouped these ideas together, I focused on the role that interface design seemed to be playing in creating all these addictive experiences. I stapled these stories together and put an index card on top, where I wrote the words “Addictive Design” with a black Sharpie. It was a guess about what I thought the trend could be.
STEP 3—Elevating
When I stepped back to look through my initial list of possible trend ideas (which usually numbers about seventy-five once I make it through the first two phases of the Haystack Method), there were several other trend concepts that seemed to possibly be related to this idea of Addictive Design.
One of them was a grouping of stories that were all about the use of gamification techniques to help people of all ages learn new skills. For that group, I had an index card on top that said “Gamified Learning,” and inside were stories about the Khan Academy using badges to inspire learning and a startup called Curious that was making learning addictive by creating bite-sized pieces of learning on interesting topics.
Another group of ideas was inspired by a book I had read earlier that year called Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss, which had focused on the idea of addiction related to food. The book exposed how snack foods, such as Oreos and Cheetos, had been created to offer a “bliss point” that mimicked the sensations of addiction in most people.3 Along with the book, I also had several other articles with similar themes that were grouped together and stapled with an index card that said “Irresistible Food.”
In this third phase of elevation, I realized that what seemed like three unique ideas (Gamified Learning, Addictive Design, and Irresistible Food), might actually be elements of a single trend. This broader idea seemed to describe a growing instance where experiences and products of multiple types were increasingly being created to be intentionally addictive.
I put all the stories for each of these three aggregated concepts together and called the elevated grouping “Ubiquitous Addiction.”
STEP 4—Naming
Now that I had examples as disparate as food manufacturing and online learning, it was time to pick a name that would effectively describe this trend. I had already come up with several to consider. As I reviewed, I dismissed “Addictive Design,” because it was too small and didn’t describe the food related examples. “Gamified Learning” was also tossed aside as too obvious and niche. The elevated name I had later defined of “Ubiquitous Addiction,” also didn’t exactly roll off the tongue and seemed to imply that more people are getting addicted to things than in the past, which I didn’t believe properly described the trend.
None of the earlier names worked and I knew I needed something better.
The final clue as to what the name of the trend could be came from another interview article I read featuring Nir Eyal. In the article, he described himself as a “behavioral engineer.” This idea of “engineering” instead of just design immediately seemed far better suited to describing what I felt the trend was.
After testing a few versions of using the word “engineering” in the title of the trend, I settled on “Engineered Addiction” as the most descriptive and memorable way to describe this trend and all of its components.
STEP 5—Proving
Once the name was in place, I had a way to talk about and share the trend to test it further. I already knew that I had stories across multiple industries and the trend had several dimensions. To get even more proof, I sought out more examples and research focused on intentionally addictive products and experiences that had been “engineered.”
My research led me to a recently published Harvard study showing why social media had become so addictive for so many, and then later to a body of research from a noted MIT anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, who spent more than fifteen years doing field research on slot machine design in Las Vegas.4
Her book, Addiction by Design, exposed the many ways that casinos use the experience and design of slot machines to encourage addictive behavior.
Together, these were the final elements of proof that would help me tell this story completely.
Engineered Addiction made my 2015 Non-Obvious Trend Report, and, ultimately, it became one of the most talked about trends that year.
Avoiding Future Babble
Now that we have gone through the process for curating trends, I want to share a final caution: the dangerous potential for much of trend forecasting to sink into nonsense.
Despite my love of trends and belief that any of us can learn to curate them, the fact remains that we live in a world frustrated with predictions, and for good reason.
Economists fail to predict activities that lead to global recessions. Television meteorologists predict rain that never comes. And business trend forecasters are perhaps the worst offenders, sharing glassy-eyed predictions that seem either glaringly obvious or naively impossible.
In 2011 journalist Dan Gardner wrote about this mistake-ridden obsession with the future in his insightful book Future Babble. Gardner illuminated the many ways that so-called experts and pundits have led us down mistaken paths and caused more harm than good.
He builds his argument based on the widely known but rarely heeded research of psychologist Philip Tetlock, who spent more than twenty years interviewing all types of experts and collected of their 27,450 predictions and ideas about the future. Tetlock then analyzed these predictions against verifiable data