by KLM Airlines for more than five decades.
Across all these rooms, the gallery typically has more than 12,000 bottles on display at any one time. The rest are stored in a bottle vault below the museum and available for display when needed.
Adding Meaning to Noise
The Mini Bottle Gallery only displays about 20% of Ringnes’ full collection at any time, and carefully keeps the rest in storage. This thoughtful curation makes the experience of seeing them valuable.
If you consider the amount of media any of us is exposed to on an average day, the quest to find meaning amongst the noise is a familiar challenge. Navigating information overload requires the same discipline as deciding what bottles to put on display so those that visitors see can tell a better story.
Curation is the ultimate method of transforming noise into meaning.
Without curation, the meaning would be lost and the experience incomprehensible.
An Accidental Trend Curator
It was only on my flight home from Oslo after that event that I realized how important curation had become for my own work.
Just a few months earlier I had published the first edition of my Non-Obvious Trend Report, inspired by an idea to publish an article from the many ideas I had collected over the past year but never written about.
What I was already doing without realizing it was collecting intriguing ideas and saving them in perhaps the most disorganized way possible—by writing them down randomly, printing them out or ripping them out of magazines and keeping them in a folder on my desk.
In producing that first report, my ambition became to describe patterns in the stories I had collected that went beyond the typical obvious observations I was always reading online. My goal was to find and develop insights that others either hadn’t yet noticed or that were not getting the attention they warranted.
To get a different output, sometimes you need a different input.
On that flight home from Norway, I realized that my accidental method for getting different input—collecting ideas for a year and waiting months before analyzing them—could actually be the very thing that would set my insights apart and make them truly Non-Obvious.
The Non-Obvious Trend Report (my annual list of 15 trends) was born from this desire to share under appreciated ideas and connect them together into predictions about the future.
Science’s Dirty Little Secret
Now, if you happen to be an analytical person, this process will hardly seem rigorous enough to be believable. How can collecting ideas and waiting possibly be a recipe for developing genuine insights? What about firsthand research? What about trend panels and using a global army of spotters? What about the science?
Well, it turns out science has a forgotten side that has little to do with devising experiments and far more to do with training your powers of observation.
When you think about the discipline that goes into scientific research and the many years of study that lead to a PhD, it is easy to see research as a task only performed by robot-like perfectionists. The truth of scientific research, just like the truth behind many equally complex areas of study, is that the people behind them are far more human than we tend to admit.
In early 2013, a PhD candidate named Beckie Port gathered and published 75 examples of scientists using the hilariously viral hashtag #overlyhonestmethods to share some brutally honest truths about the realities of scientific research.
Among the compilation of tweets Port shared online were these entertaining sound bites:
“Samples were prepared by our collaborators at MIT. We assumed no contamination because, well... they’re MIT #overlyhonestmethods” (@paulcoxon)
“Our representative device is representative of the ones which didn’t immediately explode. #overlyhonestmethods” (@ajdecon)
“Barbados was selected as a case study because the authors had a naive hope that it might justify some fieldwork there. #overlyhonestmethods” (@mlkubik)
“We used jargon instead of plain English to prove that a decade of grad school and postdoc made us smart. #overlyhonestmethods” (@eperlste)
Trends, like science, are not always perfectly observed phenomena that fit neatly into a spreadsheet to be described. Yet this doesn’t mean they don’t have immense value.
Effective scientific research always involves great observation. Scientists learn to observe the results of their experiments and then work to describe them with hypothesis and proof as best they can.
There are many similarities between trends and science, but this is only half the story. Discovering trends takes a willingness to combine curiosity with observation and add insight to create valuable ideas that you can then test to ensure they are valid.
This is vastly different from the method we often mistakenly believe is behind most work with trends: “trend spotting.” This phrase itself is a symbol of the many myths we tend to believe about those who predict or describe trends.
Let’s explore the five most common of these myths.
The 5 Myths of Trend Spotting
As a writer and speaker, I spend a lot of time seeking stories. When it comes to trends and predicting the future, the people who do this are often called “trend spotters.”
Despite what you may have heard, learning trend spotting is not the key to predicting the future.
Unfortunately, this trend-spotter bias has created a commonly referenced unreasonable portrait of the type of person who can predict the future. Consider this lazy definition for what it takes to become a trend spotter:
To become a trend spotter, someone usually receives extensive education and training in the industry he or she is interested in working for. After receiving a thorough grounding in the mechanics and history of the industry, the trend spotter could start working in company departments which predicted trends, slowly working to the rank of an official trend spotter. (Wisegeek.com)
The assumption that you need to be working in “company departments which predicted trends” is just plain idiotic – and wrong.
Anyone can learn the right habits to become better at curating trends and predicting the future for themselves. You just need to develop the right habits and mindset.
Before we start learning those habits, however, it is important to tackle the biggest myths surrounding trends and explain why they are so wrong.
Myth #1: Trends are spotted.
The idea of trend spotting suggests that there are trends simply sitting out there in plain sight ready to be observed and cataloged like avian species for bird watchers. The reality of trends is far different. Trend spotters typically find individual examples or stories. Calling the
