Welcome to The
Non-Obvious^TM
Trend Collection

Every year our team curates the most interesting and impactful trends shaping culture and business. On this site, you can browse all of the trends from the past nine years by category, industry or year.

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Robot Renaissance

As robots’ utility moves into the home and the workplace, they adopt more human-like interfaces and in some cases, micro-personalities.

Invisible Technology

As technology becomes more sophisticated, it becomes better at predicting and anticipating needs, protecting us, and providing utility while blending seamlessly into our lives.

Design is shaping the way we plan our cities, homes, and futures, and inspiring nuanced, sometimes unexpectedly heroic experiments from architects, urban planners, industrial engineers and tech gurus alike.

Data Overflow

Volumes of both personal and corporate-owned data are increasing at an exponential rate, creating pressure to turn that data into tools that serve as both practical and ethical instead of disconnected data points.

Engineered Addiction

Thanks to our increasing understanding of the behavioral science behind the formation of habits, marketers, designers, and engineers are creating products and services that are as addictive as possible.

Overquantified Life

Big data is offering more ways to quantify the world around us, but brands must be careful not to accumulate more data than they know what to do with.

Microdesign

The increasingly visual way that we experience and consume the world around us is creating a demand for information presented through efficient design and imagery.

Privacy Paranoia

Data breaches and an increasing focus on the many ways our behavior is now tracked on and offline is leading to a new global sense of paranoia about what governments and brands know about us, and how they might use this so-called “big data” in illicit ways.