PODCAST · arts
Analyzing Trends
by scenarioDNA
Analyzing Trends is written by Tim Stock and Marie Lena Tupot, co-founders of scenarioDNA, a cultural research and intelligence consultancy. Drawing on more than three decades of global fieldwork, semiotics, cultural mapping, futures analysis, and AI-assisted research, they examine how social change takes form through language, media, consumer behavior, technology, brands, and institutions. Their essays identify the cultural systems producing trends, explain how meanings change across markets and communities, and translate those findings into implications for strategy, innovation, policy, and design. Stock and Tupot are the authors of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"
Episodes
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Super is the New Smart
Donald Trump told the UN General Assembly that artificial intelligence would now be called super intelligence, saying the word artificial makes AI sound fake. The word artificial describes where the technology came from, and the word super describes where it ranks. We trace the adjective's…
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The Word Before The Trend
Cultural change shows up in the words people use long before it shows up in sales figures or policy. People describe a new experience to each other, try out phrases, and argue over what to call it. Reading those words closely shows what people are starting to tell apart, and what they still leave...
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The Signal Machine is Not the Thinking Machine
Lately it feels like every organization has built a bigger pair of binoculars. There are dashboards for everything, weekly drops of “emerging signals,” and now AI sitting on top of it all, stitching neat summaries of what is supposed to be happening next. But in the rooms where decisions get…
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The Invasion Economy
When Prada draped the Chelsea Hotel in silver and cleared Katz’s tables for a dance floor this June, the filmmaker it hired to design the takeover described the project as satellites invading Manhattan. The experience economy has morphed into an invasion economy, in which a brand re‑skins...
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Story Systems in the Age of Creator Cinema
Hollywood still talks about “discoveries,” even as the hard work now happens in public, long before anyone calls it a film. Worlds are tested in comment sections, passed around as memes, and adjusted in the small edits that keep a clip in people’s feeds for one more loop. By the time a feature...
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When Nostalgia Becomes Culture’s Operating System
Most of what passes as “trend” right now is really about how we route memory. Feeds and platforms teach us to click what we already recognize, so nostalgia quietly becomes a default strategy. It feels safe, but if every brand keeps raiding its own archive, the past stops feeling special and…
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Recycling is a Story System
California’s SB 343 “Truth in Recycling” law is interesting partly because it exposes how much the recycling symbol was never really about recycling. The chasing arrows became a civic ritual of the post-recession urban era: rinse the jar, sort the cardboard, participate in the system. In many...
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When Brand Strategy Runs Out of Story
Brands used to assume that if the numbers added up, the story would fall into place. The cases of Gucci, Nike, and Temu show the opposite is now true. Each looked structurally sound on paper, yet their business models began to erode as soon as culture stopped believing the myths that made those...
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Imagining The Spaces We Will Need
Physical spaces are not neutral settings. Our offices, kitchens, parks, malls, movie theaters, and classrooms, all tell us who belongs, what behavior is expected. They are narrative systems, not just built environments. Every layout, threshold, queue, sign, fixture, and seat rehearses a version…
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Machines Don't Yawn
Most of what we call “looking ahead” is really a mirror turned back on ourselves. Companies hire experts, build models, deploy AI to forecast markets and manage risk, but beneath the charts sit unspoken stories about who matters, who is expendable, and what “progress” is supposed to look like. In…
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Stealing Jester’s Privilege
We are living through a moment when “it was just a joke” has become a default way of speaking about serious things, from AI and product launches to corporate apologies and national policy. The old figure of the jester, who once used humor to tell hard truths to power, has been inverted: power now...
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When the Iceberg Starts to Drift
The mood of 2026 is friction at the surface. Reforms stall. Institutions grow brittle. Feeds fill with minor ruptures that never quite resolve. People talk about uncertainty, burnout, quiet cracking, but these are not abstract signals buried beneath events. They appear in work chats, neighborhood...
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The Loneliness Problem We’re Not Really Solving
Loneliness today is less a simple lack of company than a breakdown in shared meaning about what it means to be connected. Individuals move through days saturated with notifications, group chats, and parasocial ties yet feel unseen, because contact no longer guarantees recognition or obligation....
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When the Iceberg Starts to Drift
The mood of 2026 is friction at the surface. Reforms stall. Institutions grow brittle. Feeds fill with minor ruptures that never quite resolve. People talk about uncertainty, burnout, quiet cracking, but these are not abstract signals buried beneath events. They appear in work chats, neighborhood...
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Looksmaxxing and the Cost of Being Seen
Some of the most telling cultural warning signs do not look important at first. They arrive as spectacle, strange subcultures, compulsive self-performance, borrowed symbols, or people clearly pushing themselves too far. Then they get waved off as fringe behavior, filed under internet weirdness…
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The Histories and Futures of Credentialed Intelligence
“Machines scale knowledge; humans preserve wisdom. Intelligence, therefore, is not automation but awareness: the capacity to reflect, adapt, and ethically co-create new systems of understanding.” - Story Systems and Cultural Research (Routledge) A lot of the conversation around AI still feels too...
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Beyond the Chat Window
Many AI tools look impressive in a chat window, but that fluency often hides how fragile they are once their outputs drive real decisions. When you move from conversational demos to production systems, it becomes clear that what seemed like intelligence was often narrative performance, polished...
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The Grammar of Crisis
That gap between technical planning and lived stories is where crises go sideways. Leaders may think in terms of deterrence curves, transition pathways, or risk matrices, but publics respond inside narratives about who is being sacrificed, who is being heard, and whose reality still counts. When...
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The Stories Pictures Tell
There is a difference between encountering an image and looking at one. Most people, most of the time, do the former. A photograph arrives already wrapped in headlines, reactions, and forwarded commentary, and interpretation moves faster than observation ever gets a chance to. For cultural...
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Cracks in the Architecture of Bro Culture
When a code like bro culture comes under pressure, it tends to get louder before it gets smaller. The pattern is well documented: when a certain version of manhood feels like it is losing ground, it tends to exaggerate itself rather than adapt. We should expect the same from the bro. As younger...
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The Theater of Human Ideas
In creative work today the question has shifted. It is no longer “Do we have enough ideas?” but “What are humans for, now that ideas are cheap?” AI can draft credible copy, sketch campaign concepts, and outline product features in seconds. In response, organisations are doubling down on visible...
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The Grammar of the Photo Booth
On the photobooth’s 100th anniversary, its compact grammar of a fixed frame and timed shutter within a curtained chamber still teaches how machines choreograph behavior. Narrative intelligence decodes that language, turning affordances into hypotheses designers can test in the wild. If we want...
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A Generation Without Thresholds: The social rituals that once marked independence persist in social limbo
Younger generations find rites of passage unfulfilling because public life has thinned, connection is often performed, and identity work has shifted into private rehearsal that turns anxiety into a shared code. By framing culture as a living story system, we can see where meaning is forming and...
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The Year We Stopped Waiting for Normal: Revisiting 2025 Trend Themes
We are revisiting the 2025 Trend Themes with a clearer lens. Flexibility became a perk for the few, not a standard for all. Big donors shaped politics while calling it populism. AI fakes moved from novelty to everyday content. Living alone became something cities must plan for. Cities focused on...
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The Future Office: What Amazon’s Robots Are Really Telling Us About Work
When Amazon announced plans to replace more than half a million jobs with robots, most reactions focused on automation and job loss. The deeper story is about how such decisions reshape the systems that define work itself. Automation changes not only what people do but how they relate to space,...
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What Yogurt Bacteria Know About Innovation
Biological and cultural evolution follow the same logic: survival depends on exposure, not avoidance. Bacteria that developed CRISPR did not eliminate infection; they learned from it, turning viral encounters into memory. Human systems work the same way. Adaptation happens when disruption is...
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From Wellville to the War Department
From the disciplined routines of Wellville’s sanitariums to the cathartic ordeals of EST, from Robbins’ firewalks to TED’s fireside polish, American wellness has always been about performance as much as practice. What began as experiments in health and self-actualization gradually turned into...
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The Culture Crisis in Consulting
The pyramid worked because it taught you how to think. Once machines do the thinking, that whole cultural engine for building expertise starts to disappear.The recent Harvard Business Review article on AI dismantling consulting’s pyramid model points to a much deeper problem. What is unraveling…
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Global Cultural Dynamics 2035
The old categories that divided the West as open and individualist and the East as closed and collectivist no longer hold. In 2025 the United States narrows belonging despite its immigrant foundations, China’s youth turn from duty to self-care, Japan and South Korea cautiously open as…
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Mapping the Next Television Era
The 2025 Emmy Awards were more than a night of celebration. They offered a glimpse into where television might be headed. The winners reflected an industry that has moved past the height of Peak TV, when lavish budgets and endless new dramas defined the landscape. What we saw instead was a field…
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After the Social Network
The internet began as a research network. It was built to move facts between people who needed to verify one another. The social era translated that spirit into a single public square and promised that connection would produce clarity. What it produced at scale was a feed. The feed made attention...
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Seeing Things: Cultural Hallucinations and the Future of Design Thinking and Foresight
Hallucination is not a malfunction but a feature of cognition. When signals are thin or ambiguous, the mind completes the picture, blending memory, expectation, and feeling into a coherent scene. In 2025 that architecture meets an anxious, high-velocity information climate, so pattern-seeking…
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The Quiet Crack - What Alien: Earth gets right about hybrid life and why it matters at work.
This Labor Day has me thinking about monsters. Not the ones that chase you, but the kind that smile from a dashboard and tell you everything is fine. Alien: Earth gets this right. Its hybrid child is a mirror for a work life where people move beside machines and the line between the two keeps...
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When Brands Break Culture
In 2025, branding no longer works the way it once did. Trust is in sharp decline, with fewer than half of consumers believing brands are honest about their values, even as expectations continue to climb. A majority of Gen Z want brands to drive social change, but only a fraction believe they...
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Edges & Intelligence
An edge is not missing data. It is the instruction set for seeing. That came into focus after I watched a Google Gemini clip that tried to “walk into” Nighthawks and filled the frame with plausible alleys and doors. The location that inspired the painting sits at the corner of Greenwich Avenue…
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The Dead as Cultural Mirrors
In 2025, performative culture has no pause button. Every public figure is locked in a constant loop of self-presentation where each move is dissected, reframed, and turned into content within hours. Visibility is the currency, but fatigue is the price. In semiotic terms, the living operate as…
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Rethininking Culture in Fashion
When a global sportswear giant was called to account for releasing a sandal that closely mirrored a traditional Oaxacan design, it became clear that the debate over cultural appropriation in fashion is no longer confined to the margins. Such controversies are unfolding in a legal and cultural...
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Who Owns Innovation?
Innovation isn’t just about ideas; it’s about who controls the language that defines them. When Elon Musk declared that xAI would no longer use the term researcher, it wasn’t just a semantic tweak. It was a signal. Stripping out that label repositions authority, redefining who gets to build, who...
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Shibboleths in Branding
In cultural theory, a shibboleth is a subtle signifier that identifies group membership. Originally a linguistic term, it has evolved to describe any behavioral, visual, or contextual cue that functions as an insider signal. In branding, shibboleths are the unspoken codes that mark shared...
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Beyond Emotional Branding
In a world where brands function as cultural artifacts rather than just commercial entities, traditional metrics no longer tell the full story. To understand a brand’s true value and its potential for longevity, we must move beyond surface-level sentiment and transactional data. What matters now…
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Decoding Scapegoats
Scapegoating in contemporary culture reveals a deeper failure not only in public discourse but in the way research and foresight are practiced. When societies assign blame to symbolic targets such as migrants, youth, AI, or academic institutions, they often reflect a broader discomfort with...
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Rethinking the Unknowns
In the wake of this weekend’s strike on Iran, the urgency to reassess how we understand uncertainty is clear. Strategic decisions are often driven by what appears to be missing, yet the real blind spots may lie in how meaning is constructed and perceived. A mixed-method approach that combines...
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Measuring the Irrationality of Culture
Cultural behavior rarely follows a straight line. What looks irrational on the surface often reflects deeper emotional logics, shifting norms, and emergent values. This piece explores how strategic foresight can move beyond binary thinking to recognize ambiguity as a key signal, not a flaw in the...
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Foresight as Augmented Memory
In a world increasingly shaped by GenAI, memory becomes an active tool for understanding, not just a static archive of the past. Rather than offering linear predictions, GenAI helps us uncover forgotten narratives, buried assumptions, and long patterns that still influence the present. It allows…
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Revealing Implicit Cultural Domains
In a world focused on logic and optimization, the real forces shaping our future often exist beneath the surface in the quiet codes of culture. From the design of suburban lawns to the voices of digital assistants, everyday elements carry hidden narratives. These implicit cultural domains are not...
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Sport Design Futures: From Social Change to Data‑Driven Play
In this episode of Analyzing Trends, we explore how sport is evolving from a stage of protest and identity to a site of technological transformation and social impact. From the legacy of athlete-activists to the rise of biometric performers and subscription-supported creators, we unpack how sport...
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The Ozempic Era of Food and Health
Metabolic health is no longer just a medical issue. It is a cultural flashpoint shaping body image, social equity, and how communities build trust. What began as a pharmaceutical breakthrough is now influencing the way people eat, connect, and express identity. The deeper story is not about the...
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The AI Purity Test
In this episode, we explore the rise of the AI purity test, a new social instinct that quietly judges people based on how they use artificial intelligence in their work. From subtle comments about writing that feels too polished to deeper assumptions about effort and authenticity, we look at how...
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Let Machines Be Machines
What if the future of AI wasn't about making machines more human, but about helping humans better understand themselves? In a world increasingly shaped by frictionless communication and emotionally polished chatbots, we’re beginning to trade the messy, imperfect, deeply human textures of...
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The Ghosted Generation
In a culture that often confuses performance with participation, quiet departures are becoming more common. Ghosting is no longer just avoidance—it reflects a shift toward self-preservation, emotional boundaries, and the desire for more intentional forms of presence. Amid digital fatigue and...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Analyzing Trends is written by Tim Stock and Marie Lena Tupot, co-founders of scenarioDNA, a cultural research and intelligence consultancy. Drawing on more than three decades of global fieldwork, semiotics, cultural mapping, futures analysis, and AI-assisted research, they examine how social change takes form through language, media, consumer behavior, technology, brands, and institutions. Their essays identify the cultural systems producing trends, explain how meanings change across markets and communities, and translate those findings into implications for strategy, innovation, policy, and design. Stock and Tupot are the authors of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"
HOSTED BY
scenarioDNA
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Analyzing Trends have?
Analyzing Trends currently has 90 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Analyzing Trends about?
Analyzing Trends is written by Tim Stock and Marie Lena Tupot, co-founders of scenarioDNA, a cultural research and intelligence consultancy. Drawing on more than three decades of global fieldwork, semiotics, cultural mapping, futures analysis, and AI-assisted research, they examine how social...
How often does Analyzing Trends release new episodes?
Analyzing Trends has 90 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Analyzing Trends?
You can listen to Analyzing Trends on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Analyzing Trends?
Analyzing Trends is created and hosted by scenarioDNA.
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