💥 Just do stuff, 🐝 Buzzing futures & 🗑️ Research Slop
Dear you,
If a new year started in your time calendar I’m wishing you lots of love, health & connection for 2026. And if you use a different time cycle, I’m still wishing you the same. 🙃
Talking about connection, the past two years I’ve been focusing more on actively connecting. I felt it could be an antidote to events happening in the wider world, doomscrolling and despair. It seemed a way for me to change things that lie within my ‘circle of influence’. I was reminded of this while reading a book by Rob Hopkins (from 2013!) the other day called “The power of just doing stuff.” Which mainly is a showcase of radical localism and the Transition Town movement. This bottom-up approach of just getting started and see what happens is inspiring to me. And as social scientist Robert Putnam’s research has repeatedly shown: connection is often a better solution to local problems than, for example, increasing surveillance by police or cameras.
Just to give you some examples as inspiration of what actively seeking/creating local connection looked like for me:
🏡 Setting up a residents committee in my apartment block (which houses 111 apartments) and organising activities like coffee meetups and street bbq’s.
🏸 Assisting as a volunteer youth trainer at my local badmintonclub and finding out about “67”, “clock it” and “tjappies” from eleven year-olds.
👩🏻🎓 Organising a reunion of my favourite high school class mates who I hadn't seen for almost 30 years.
📚 Becoming a member of my local bookstore so it could be turned into a cooperation instead of going bankrupt.
⛑️ Being on the board of my Broodfonds, which is a great way for Dutch freelancers to cover financially for potential incapacity to work, all build on trust and community.
👚Using ClothingLoop to swap clothes with people from my neighbourhood.
👯♀️ Organising three Futures Friends events in Amsterdam with Stefanie Schillmöller, although we both loath event planning 😭
Although the above is all unpaid, done in spare time and not always super fun or without friction, it certainly feels rewarding when I see people coming together. I don’t aspire to be a politician or a hardcore activist, so this way I can still change things in a manner that fits me.
Andddd….. this all relates to trends and futures because it’s about thinking of your desirable future (in my case, a more connected one), then taking action and creating the change you want to see.
Maybe something to reflect on yourself:
What is your preferred way to change things around you?
What did you kickstart last year that sparked change locally?
What can you do this year to improve your neighbourhood?
Oh, and I almost forgot that this newsletter is also a way for me to connect with you! So let’s move on to this month’s treasure trove of all things trends & futures.
/ Els
Heard elsewhere
❝ The aim is curiosity, not certainty. ❞
I noted this down but forgot to label the source. ☠️ I think this is mainly what I try to achieve when training people in trend research: become more open, observe with intent and ask loads of questions.
Trend Talk
It’s that time of the year again when all kinds of so-called predictions for 2026 are sprinkled around like fairy dust.
The perfect moment to share my blog again on how to deal with these trend lists and reports. Because do trends really suddenly change at the turn of the year…..??
⬇️👇⬇️👇⬇️👇⬇️👇⬇️👇⬇️👇⬇️👇⬇️👇⬇️👇⬇️👇⬇️👇
Train more!
Want to get inspired and update your trend skills in 2026?
🙇 Trying to make sense of a changing world and in need of some future tools?
🎓 HO Gent (applied university) is offering a unique masterclass series about Trendwatching on location in Belgium! In 4 afternoons you will learn:
Essential trend theory
How to find signals of change
To turn signals into trend insights
Integrating trends into innovation processes
🌟 Each afternoon has a theme and an expert who will elaborate on the theme & work together with you on your organisational or personal trend plan.
👩🏻🏫 I’m invited by HO Gent as the expert on the trend research cycle.
👯♀️ Hope to meet you soon in Aalst and discuss all things trends! NB: sessions are in Dutch.
Go elsewhere
🌟 trend sources recommendations
🤲 resource - Creative Commons Signals. Creative Commons is celebrating their 25th anniversary in 2026! CC Signals are a proposed framework to help content stewards express how they want their works used in AI training, emphasising reciprocity, recognition, and sustainability in machine reuse.
🎙️podcast - How to be creative with data analysis. A conversation with the editors of The Handbook of Creative Data Analysis, about the role of creativity in research, its benefits for analysis and communication, and the anxieties and difficulties people might experience around using creative methods for the first time.
🃏 game - Buzzing Futures. A free downloadable interactive discussion game that invites players to explore the future of ecosystems through the lens of pollinators. Developed by the Embassy of the Republic of Slovenia in collab with UN Global Pulse.
📖 books
Meer dan Modemeisjes by Nsimba Valene Lontanga. “More than fashion girls” is written by a former student of mine. Follow her! 🫶 She describes how fashion is political and writes in a very personal way about the many voices not being heard in the fashion industry, including her own as a black woman.
Designing Futures, A guide to exploring, visualizing and negotiating future scenarios by Benedikt Groß & Eileen Mandir. The website comes with handy downloadable templates.
Artifacts, a visual history of technology from 1965 to the present by Timeless. It’s is a gallery in print taking you on a journey through five eras of innovation.
🖼️ image databases
COSMOS, dubbed as “the Pinterest alternative for creatives. Your creative sanctuary. Discover, collect and share what moves you.” They know how to sell it! 😭
SOOT Spiral has an interesting way of displaying the images that come out of your search query. “Designed to make searching feel more like exploring, it turns a single prompt into a layered moodboard within seconds.”
📃 articles
We should all be Luddites by Courtney Radsch. Super interesting read on tech & society: “To be a Luddite today is to refuse the fatalism of techno-inevitability and to demand that technology serve the many, not just the few.”
Research Slop by Jess Holbrook. Thoughtful piece on using in AI in research projects. Gives me hope again that the Head of UX Research for Microsoft AI has written this. 🙌🏻
‘I awoke at ½ past 7’ by Elena Mary provides interesting historical context on self-monitoring and journaling showing that the search for optimisation already started in the Victorian age. Diaries were apparently a big hit back then.
Futures of Everyday Life: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Future Personas in Scenarios by Gerhard Schönhofer, Pauli Komonen, Jan Oliver Schwar and Laura Bechthold. Academic article showing that many scenario reports are quite elitist, stereotypical, and technocratic, often replicating dominant societal narratives rather than fostering substantive shifts in how the future is imagined. The researchers call for more polyphonic scenarios!
⚽️ playful stuff
PlayPhraseMe. A site for cinema archeologists: “Type any quote, watch the scenes.”
World Map of Human Ideas. A map that helps to explore the birthplaces of ideas that shaped civilization
Polymarket. People place bets on events such as if the Iranian regime will fall before 2027, what the bitcoin rate will be and when a new Stranger Things episode will air.
🛠️ practical stuff
Bmrng.me. Nalden, one of the co-founders of WeTransfer, sold the company and is not amused with WeTransfers’ new policies. So he created this new service to share files privately.
Vert. An open source file converter with no ads.
🎥 500.000 jpg’s
Artist Eryk Salvaggio / Cybernetic Forests made this music + video after reading a Reddit post from a Stable Diffusion (an ai-tool) user stating “I have generated well over 200,000 images and I have no clue what I am supposed to do with them.” It’s quite mesmerising to watch. 👇
🏟 live events
🌍 Futures Friends city events keep launching. This year Vienna, Berlin and Bogota will be on its way. Check Instagram and LinkedIN to stay updated on dates & locations.
🇳🇱 Deep tech Day at University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Science on January 28. Discover leading research in areas such as quantum technologies, AI, photonics, nanotechnology, sustainability and synthetic biology.
🇳🇱 Brainwash Night - Safe & Sound in Amsterdam on March 12. Tackling the subject of safety with performances, talks en films.
🇩🇪 Beyond Tellerand April 27-28 in Düsseldorf. A conference for designers, coders and creatives.
🇩🇰 Future Days in Copenhagen on June 10-12. A co-creative space where changemakers, creatives, and professionals come together to imagine ways of navigating our futures.
Explore more
👀 Activate your senses and train your capability to explore more openly.
See your daily life as a sensory expedition full of opportunities to spot the most interesting and weird things and hone your observation skills.
Language can be a signal of change, whether it’s a new term shared via socials, a new word you saw on a poster in the streets or overheard someone saying at the busstop.
/ For example, here are two of my recent ‘found words’: Knowledgemaxxing and Slopaganda.
💥 Your prompt » collect new words online & offline
👾 Ready Player 1? Your challenge starts now, 1 month to complete!
🎥 video - Humans in the loop.
I’m going to give this movie from India by Aranya Sahay a watch this week. Plot line: Nehma finds herself raising a child, and a machine. An indigenous woman from Jharkhand begins labeling data for AI, while raising her children as a single mother. She realises how much she's misunderstood by both of them.
Work Elsewhere
💼 trend related jobs
⚡️ Kickstart your career in trends with the job postings below!
🔍 Even if you’re not looking to switch roles, the vacancy descriptions provide a glimpse into the ways companies work with trends.
// Senior roles
🇪🇸 / 🇮🇳 Head of Research at Revolut in Spain and India.
🇩🇪 Foresight Manager(in)at Handelsblatt in Dusseldorf, Germany.
// Junior/Medior roles
🇳🇱 Trend en toekomstonderzoeker at NVWA in Utrecht, The Netherlands
🇬🇧 Freelance Systemic Researcher at School of System Change in the U.K.
🇪🇸 Strategist at Frog in Madrid, Spain.
// Internships / residencies / fellowships
🇩🇪 Design & Trend Research Praktikum at Continental in Weissbach, Germany.
🌏 Temporalities of AI, call for papers at Max Planck Institute in Rome, Italy.
🇺🇸 Creative Futures: Counterstructures, a residency for creative technologists to prototype new cultural R&D for AI at Mozilla Foundation in NYC, USA.
🇺🇸 Hospital of Emotions, open call for artists in L.A., USA.
/ Let me know when you are trend hiring or spot an interesting trend vacancy. Or when you landed a job because you saw it here.👇
Sticky statement
👁 straight from the streets into your inbox
Recently I was hired to give Dutch cultural context around trends in food & beverages. I thinks this picture sums it all up culture-wise. 😹 Practical, no fuss, all- in-1 machine cooking. The air fryer is a Dutch invention made by Fred van de Weij around 2005, then bought and further developed by Philips. The rest is history…. And yes, Dutchies have no shame in using it for Christmas (‘Kerst’) dishes too. 😜
/ Did you spot an interesting sticky statement and want to share it? 👇
Heerlijk om te lezen!