Don’t always Follow Trends…

A lot of people make a lot of money creating and publicising trends, in design and elsewhere. 

They’d like you to think that your only option as a rational human being is to follow the latest trends.

They are wrong.

The most important thing that you can do, design- and otherwise, is to be true to yourself.  Don’t do something because other people are doing it—whatever is “trending” might be right for them and not for you or right for nobody at all.

Things like our personality and our culture influence the sorts of design that makes us most comfortable, that actually improve our lives, and a trend may align with our best ways of living or not.

For instance, introverted people would prefer to live in spaces that are more effectively divided up into different areas for particular activities and extraverts feel better about living (and working) open plan.  Since extraverts love things like being on television home redesign programs which introverts often clamor to escape, living without walls became a thing, a trend.  All the while, introverts who feel better about living their own life and not just “going along,” have fueled a mini-industry of putting in walls to divide up the big open spaces that are “on trend.”

Another personality trait that can have a big effect:  how open we are to novel, different sorts of experiences.  As a group, designers are pretty positive about doing something that is unique (or at least pretty rare), and trends that originate with designers may favor unconventional solutions.  Not everyone is predisposed to favor the novel, however.  Many among us, who are not in the least bit trying to live in a bygone era or renounce a single one of our modern conveniences prefer to go with the tried and true, often more traditional choices.

For more information on designing to support particular personalities, read this article.

Where we’re raised on the planet determines the national culture that drives our design-related expectations and experiences for the rest of our lives—and some of those effects can seem pretty subtle, even though they’re quite powerful.

People raised in more individualistic cultures, for instance, love to fiddle with their designed world, seemingly, often, for the sheer joy of making a change.  A few pieces of furniture or a screen will get shifted around, and maybe ultimately moved back to their original position.  A plant will find its way from one window to another in an office suite, not because of difference in natural light.  Rugs may be changed out or changed around or even flipped upside down.  People from collectivistic cultures do not share this penchant for making things different.  If spaces that will be used by people from more individualistic cultures can’t be modified slightly by users, they “ugly up” fast—changes that can’t be gracefully made are indeed made in the end, anyway, even if scarring results.  A trend that requires big, heavy pieces of furniture, in an individualistic culture, may result in an increased number of hernia operations on humans and furniture legs that get broken as whatever gets slid from one place to another.

For more on designing to support national culture, read this article.

Being “on trend” is regularly better for the bank accounts of the trend makers than it is for the wellbeing of the rest of the population.  Caught up in following trends?  Beware.