I recently hosted a conversation with Ntombi Khambule and Khensani Mohlatlole at the inaugural Craft and Design Institute’s Making It conference, exploring what sits beneath trends, and what it means to design beyond them.
These are some of my notes and reflections from that discussion.
We spend a lot of time talking about “trends” as if they are the future. But most of the time, they’re not. They’re a system. One that extracts from culture, compresses it into something legible, and aligns entire industries to move in sync, often long after the moment has passed.
What became clear in our conversation is this: Trends don’t create culture: they extract from culture. They begin as real signals, shifts in behaviour, taste, and need but are quickly amplified, simplified and organised. Not to deepen understanding, but to coordinate manufacturing, retail and marketing. In the process, complexity is stripped away in favour of alignment.
What we call a “trend” is sometimes just a delayed version of something that already happened
But culture doesn’t move at the same pace. It is moving at rapid speed. So, by the time something is identified, forecasted and distributed, it has already been lived, and often left behind. What we call a “trend” is sometimes just a delayed version of something that already happened. Refined. Repeated. Made easy to sell.
So what does consumer behaviour actually look like right now? Fast. Fragmented. Constantly shifting. But at the same time – and this is where it gets interesting – people are searching for something much slower. Meaning. Quality. Connection. There’s a tension between the desire for novelty and a deeper need for stability and identity. People move quickly across aesthetics, but hold onto what feels personal.
If not trends, what should we be paying attention to? Not just surface aesthetic cues. But rather, deep inspection of behaviour. Habits. Rituals. Environments. Materials. Communities. These are slower signals. Harder to quantify, but far more accurate. They reflect how people actually live, not just how they present themselves.
Designing beyond trends is not about stepping outside the system. That’s almost impossible. We all operate within cultural and commercial structures. The shift is in how consciously we engage.
A clear point of view that doesn’t change with every season. It does not extract from culture
Designing beyond trends, in practice, looks like: Fewer, more considered products. Longer development cycles. Consistency in direction. A clear point of view that doesn’t change with every season. It does not extract from culture. It’s less about reacting. It is more about building a body of work.
And this is where the question became sharper: Is working outside of trends a privilege, or a necessity? It may have once been a luxury. But as cycles accelerate, stepping outside of them is increasingly how brands create clarity, differentiation, and resilience.
Because if everything is constantly changing, the real work becomes choosing what stays constant. Values. Materials. Ways of working. A point of view.
There is also a cost to trends we don’t speak about enough. When culture is compressed into something digestible, we lose: nuance, context, depth, origin. Complex cultural expressions become flattened into aesthetics. Easy to replicate. Easy to sell. Easy to lose meaning.
So what is worth designing today? Not everything needs to be new to feel alive. The work that lasts is the work that feels necessary. Things people return to. Keep. Repair. Build relationships with. Not just consume.
If you design for hype, you produce for waste
What came through in this conversation is that trends themselves are not the problem. It’s how blindly we follow them. Because ultimately: If you design for hype, you produce for waste. What you refuse to follow defines what you stand for. And the strongest point of view is the one that can hold its shape over time.
