Need to Know
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London – On 17 October, 100 delegates attended the Global Futures Forum, The Future Laboratory’s annual festival of ideas, at our Elder Street home.

This year, we customised the experience by inviting attendees and brand representatives to choose their own futures. With more than one possible future available to them, guests could firstly discover the Future of Brand Purpose – uncovering how consumers’ moral values are changing their expectations of brands – or the Future of Gender, which explored how masculinity and femininity are being reframed for the decade ahead.

In two further sessions, attendees were guided through the Future of Wellbeing amid the convergence of wellness and health, and the Future of Youth – including the premiere of our youth macrotrend The Anxiety Rebellion. The Global Futures Forum also welcomed a number of global disruptors, who presented keynote speeches and took part in guest panels, helping to shape and elaborate the conversation around each topic.

To choose your brand’s potential futures, explore our Global Futures Forum microsite.

Shanghai - The new store collates fashion and retail innovations in one place, embodying the concept Nike has spearheaded in recent years.

The House of Innovation is a cross-category retail space set over four levels, offering products that are hyper-local to the needs and desires of Shanghai customers. A digitally enabled Centre Court sits among the retail space, where customers can attend speaker sessions, workshops and interactive product trials. In addition, members of the brand’s NikePlus scheme can book personal shopping experiences with store assistants.

The space also offers the Nike by You service, which brings members and designers together to customise shoes and create one-of-a-kind footwear, adding a human touch to the brand’s digital Nike ID platform.

This year, the sports brand has further explored the use of technology to transform bricks-and-mortar retail. In July 2018, Nike opened a concept store in Los Angeles that uses the real-time data of shoppers to build a localised product offering.

Melbourne – A team of researchers have developed Sans Forgetica, a typeface that draws on the principles of cognitive psychology to help readers remember their notes.

According to the researchers at RMIT Behavioural Business Lab, Sans Forgetica makes use of Gestalt’s Law of Closure, which hypothesises that our brains fill in the gaps when part of an object appears unfinished. As such, the letters in the typeface are left incomplete, rendering them hard to decipher at first sight. As a result, the brain works harder to complete the letters, pushing it to engage its cognitive abilities in order to digest the written content.

Although primarily aimed at students with the intention of helping them improve the revision process, the font can be download free, which means it can help with the wider learning of typed materials.

At a time when consumers often scan content rather than take time to read it, designers are adjusting their typography to fit. The emergence of such Quick-glance Design is explored in our macrotrend The Focus Filter.

Ikea’s latest Life at Home report, which surveyed 22,000 people in 22 countries, explores what it means to be at home. Touching on issues of loneliness and urban living, the study found that 53% of people don’t get a sense of belonging from their residential home.

This may be due to a lack of privacy. With more people in home-sharing arrangements, 33% of those living with friends or strangers feel they have to leave the house in order to have alone time. The study also questions whether a car could be considered a extension of the home. Almost half of Americans (45%) go to their car to have private moments to themselves.

Brands need to consider how they can improve people’s relationship with their home and inject a sense of belonging and security in a space that’s often shared with others. For more on this subject, read our Far Futures series.