Need to Know
18 : 09 : 17

London – Creative studio Patternity is working with global charitable foundation Wellcome to examine new ways of visualising disease for its Infectious Pattern campaign.

Exploring how design can determine people’s behaviour towards one of humanity’s biggest threats, the multiplatform campaign will engage the public through window displays, film and creative workshops, using patterns to inform people how diseases are spread.

‘By working with visual patterns – in this case bold window patterns and moving images – we can visualise the unseen patterns of infectious diseases: how they spread both within the body and in society at large,' says Grace Winteringham, co-founder of Patternity. To read more about the designers that are helping to rebrand the healthcare sector by adopting a less sterile, more engaging design aesthetic, see our Soft Aid design direction.

UK – The British Fashion Council (BFC) has worked with designer Vivienne Westwood and the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan to launch Fashion Switch, a new climate change initiative that aims to enact change in the industry through collaboration. Part of the BFC’s Positive Fashion programme, the project is designed to encourage brands and businesses in the fashion sector to commit to switching to green energy providers by 2020 to tie in with the commencement of the Paris Agreement, for which all member nations have pledged to ensure that 20% of their total energy consumption will be derived from renewable energy by 2020.

Announced at the opening of London Fashion Week, the initiative is a bold step towards creating real change in the industry. For more on the challenges faced by brands in the sector and the strategies needed to overcome them, book The Future Laboratory’s Fashion Futures 2017 in-house presentation.

London – Immersive design duo Bompas & Parr are working with the Mondrian hotel to hold a late-night spa experience that explores a more sinister side to wellness. Artist Lucy Hardcastle, visual studio Method Studios, experiential food creators Edible Stories and design agency Lyon & Lyon have designed a bespoke roster of peculiar treatments, including the Shadow Wrap, which plays on sensory deprivation by immersing visitors in total darkness while they are enveloped in a full body wrap while listening to an immersive monologue voiced by Hardcastle.

The Spa of Unconscious Desires, which will take place on 19 September, provides an ‘antithesis to the conventional world of wellness’, provoking reactions ranging from comfort to fear and disgust. As the use of the term wellness becomes increasingly prevalent its meaning has been diluted, with consumers now looking beyond wellness to scientifically grounded healthcare. For more, see our Healthcare Market report.

Driven by the dominance of mega-systems such as Amazon, eBay and Alibaba’s Tmall, which between them were expected to account for about £268.6bn ($365bn, €305bn) in sales in 2016, according to Euromonitor, new figures show that online shoppers are increasingly using these types of e-commerce marketplaces rather than visiting individual brands’ websites. For more on the changing retail habits of consumers, buy our Retail Futures Report 2017 here.