LSN : Daily Signals : Foresight Friday: Martin Raymond, co-founder and editor-in-chief

Iga Węglińska explores the power of sensory restraint

Perfect Sense, Iga Węglińska, Poland

Poland – Designer Iga Węglińska’s Perfect Sense explores how design can recalibrate human perception. The project comprises a series of six masks that investigate sensory substitution – the brain’s ability to compensate when access to one sense is reduced by intensifying others.

Węglińska’s research-driven work explores extended embodiment, treating garments as living, responsive systems capable of sensing, expressing and amplifying the emotional and sensory experience of the wearer – which mirrors ideas explored in our Mood-matching Fashion report.

The project also situates design within wider discussions around transhumanism, examining how technological extensions of the body may reshape perception and redefine the boundaries of human experience.

Through speculative wearable objects, Perfect Sense examines how shifts in sensory input can reorganise perceptual hierarchies and alter how people interpret the world around them.

In our Designing Silence report, we examine how sensory restraint, particularly involving sound and sight, is emerging as a deliberately designed experience. Węglińska’s work explores similar ideas from a design perspective, demonstrating how the strategic reduction or modulation of certain senses can heighten others.

Strategic opportunity

Move beyond visual-first design by experimenting with sensory restraint and substitution across products, retail and digital environments. Strategically reduce or amplify sound, touch and light to create memorable brand experiences that reshape perception

Foresight Friday: Martin Raymond, co-founder and editor-in-chief

Martin Raymond, co-founder and editor-in-chief, The Future Laboratory, UK

Every Friday, we offer an end-of-week wrap-up of the topics, issues, ideas and virals we’re all talking about. This week, co-founder Martin Raymond unpacks what C-suite leaders really need from foresight intelligence right now.

: According to a recent survey by Deloitte, CEO optimism about company performance has plummeted from 84% to just 60% in a matter of months, while pessimism about the global economy has skyrocketed from 18% to 58% – no surprises there.

: But as a leader, C-suite member or head of your company’s strategy team, if you’re feeling the same uncertainty, you’re not alone. Many leadership teams I’ve spoken to over the past few months tell me they are feeling the same way. War, ongoing uncertainty, more war, more ongoing uncertainty and yet more war and… well, you can guess the next bit…

: Indeed, for most of us, strategy can feel like a guessing game of uncertainty on steroids. ‘How,’ one CEO asked me, while working on my latest leadership podcast, ‘do you distinguish a temporary tremor from a seismic, market-altering shift?’ Especially when the cost of getting it wrong is steep.

: The answer to getting it right isn’t a crystal ball; it’s a very precise framework for navigating short- and mid-term uncertainty with confidence, and turning volatility into a strategic advantage rather than regarding it as an unclear, but ever-present danger.

: This is why we created our Strategic Foresight Intelligence Briefing (SF:IB). It’s a quarterly analysis built for C-suite leaders and senior managers who need to make high-stakes decisions in a low-visibility world. This isn’t another off-the-shelf trend report. It is a tailored, client-specific intelligence briefing designed to connect emerging signals to your specific sector and business challenges.

: So how does it work? With our analysts, AI and our intelligence partnership offer, we anchor our intelligence in a simple but powerful temporal framework: NOW/NEXT/FUTURE – where we unpack the drivers, trends, threats, challenges and disruptor case studies that are set to affect your business over the short, medium and long term. This structure is designed to help you separate the signal from the noise and translate complex foresight into an actionable, easy-to-follow roadmap.

Learn more on The Future Laboratory blog

Stat: Poor health and education drive female unemployment, new research shows

AI imagery by The Future Laboratory, UK

UK – New research shows young women are increasingly falling out of the workforce in the UK, even as unemployment among young men declines.

The Women in Work 2026 index and report from PwC, which analyses official data from 33 countries, shows that almost one million people aged 16–24 are now classed as NEET (not in education, employment or training) in the UK.

Latest figures from the UK’s Office for National Statistics reveal that the overall NEET rate is now 12.8%, largely because of difficulties facing women. While the number of young men out of work fell from July to December 2025, an additional 13,000 young women entered the category.

The unemployment rate among young women rose from 9.5% to 11.8% in 2024, the largest annual increase since the PwC index began in 2011.

There are a number of reasons for the shift. It is primarily because of lower educational attainment and deteriorating health outcomes: young women leaving school with low grades are more likely to become NEET than their male peers, particularly when combined with health issues.

Lewis Maleh, CEO of recruitment firm Bentley Lewis, says structural differences in career pathways are also contributing.

‘When young men leave school without strong grades, there are well-established routes waiting, like construction, trades, logistics,’ he says. ‘Young women with the same low education go towards retail, care or hospitality. These sectors have been shrinking and offer limited progression.’

Read the ‘Work: Polarising Professionals’ section of our Gen Z Now and Next: From Vision to Contradiction report to understand the wider shifts shaping young people’s attitudes to work and opportunity.

Strategic opportunity

Create inclusive workplaces that combine on-the-job learning with health-focused support to enable young women with lower grades or health challenges to enter and thrive in the workforce