A recent mid-day radio program here in Washington DC had a couple of very well-informed, well-educated, and articulate commentators talking about the green economy. One, at some point early in the hour went out of her way to say something along the lines of ‘that [something] is a trend…well no, I don’t mean trend as in a trend, but rather I mean something important.’ This was worthy of an eye-roll in itself, but then the other guest and the program host went to extraordinary lengths during the remaining 56 minutes not to use the term, despite the fact that it was far-and-away the most appropriate choice in the entire English language for what they were talking about.

Futurists make their bones (as well as their daily bread) with trends. Identifying, understanding, contexualizing, and helping others explore trends is what we do, whether we do it for clients, colleagues, or the public. Merriam-Webster’s various definitions for trend all come back to movement over time. We pay attention to trends, to the movement of ideas, technologies, inclinations, and cultures over time in an effort not to predict the future, but to define a sphere of inquiry and imagination (another word that has gotten a bad wrap recently). At the same time we train ourselves to anticipate not only the possibility, but the probability, that something we’re not even watching, or doesn’t exist, will suddenly change the game entirely.

The thing with trends, of course, is that they are many. Many won’t have significant impact at all on the things we study. But the future, like the present and the past, is a systems affair. The point isn’t in significance per se, but in influence. And it is here that even the trendy matters. For instance, the iPhone was (still is?) trendy in a sort of ‘let’s laugh at the the too cool crowd’ way, but at the same time it represents potentially dramatic and influential trends (e.g. information ubiquity, social omnipresence, human-machine interface).

It’s easy for serious people talking about serious things to want to stay away from the trendy, even if it might be really important. But trends are another matter entirely.

An exercise: take something unimaginably trendy (but not the iPhone since we’ve already done that), and think about what else it might have to say about where we might be going. Extra points if you can work something out for Rock of Love Bus.