by Karla Paniagua,
Introduction
Trend analysis identifies and interprets geographically localized patterns of change expressed in the behavior of specific social groups. These patterns involve shifts in conduct and idiosyncrasy that have tangible manifestations. This approach aligns with Mary O’Hara-Devereaux’s Law of the Future, which states that significant events must begin somewhere.
The same exercise can work in two opposite directions. Read as one conjecture among several, a trend widens the field of what may happen. When read as a forecast whose method and point of enunciation remain undeclared, however, it narrows the field. It delivers what Inayatullah (2008) calls a “used future”: an image of tomorrow inherited from someone else’s context and adopted as though it were one’s own destiny. I claim that trend analysis, as it circulates in much of Latin America, has drifted toward the latter direction and that this drift is produced by ordinary methodological habits rather than external imposition.
After years of searching for my place in futures studies, I found it at the intersection of cultural and futures studies through trend analysis. After many twists and turns (which keep going, as I am still learning), studying the literature, and experiencing successes and failures as a trainer and consultant, I developed a working model that adapts well-known best practices from analytical traditions that I will discuss later. I adapted these practices to support geolocalized reflection. Along the way, I identified limiting and erroneous beliefs that facilitate the reproduction of vague and foreign official futures, which I should elicit and review.
Two questions organize what follows. First, how can trend analysis contribute to reproducing official and foreign futures? Second, what solutions are possible? I will answer these questions by examining the devices each lineage left behind and the two modes through which they are reinscribed in the region. I will also present two of my own answers.
No single official Latin American future exists
From my point of view, there is no such thing as a single official Latin American future, or even official national futures, because Latin America is a complex and diverse region, the cradle of magical realism and tons of contradictions. Even in nations with a formally articulated national vision expressed in public policy (Colombia, Dominican Republic, Peru, Paraguay, among others), this does not mean such a vision frames the pull of the future (Inayatullah, 2023) for all citizens. The very idea of an official Latin American future could itself be read as a limiting belief that reduces a complex reality to a stereotype.
A second clarification. The adoption of any method, regardless of origin, is not a problem in itself, and methodological nationalism does not prevent the uncritical reproduction of official futures. A report produced entirely in the region can reinscribe a used future as efficiently as an imported one.
Three lineages and the legacy they left behind
Trend analysis has diverse origins, parallel lines of development that may or may not converge today.
The first origin is the statistical measurement of social change for public policy purposes. William Ogburn led Recent Social Trends in the United States (1933), a pioneering effort to systematize data series on social change across an entire nation. Ogburn argued that underlying trends are persistent and therefore extrapolatable (a claim that, from my point of view, is unsustainable today), and observed that analysts notice striking deviations before the underlying direction, which still happens today. This lineage bequeathed two crucial elements: the discipline of separating noise from direction, and the assumption that a measured direction can be projected forward.
The second origin relates to strategic foresight. Sherman Kent proposed estimative intelligence as the foundation for anticipatory decision-making (Kent, 1949), and Harold Lasswell developed a model for longitudinally reviewing the press to track the rise and fall of political concepts (Lasswell et al., 1949). Francis Aguilar (1967) proposed systematically tracking companies’ environments, and his economic, technological, political, and social dimensions became a precursor to STEEP (Lum, 2014; Bradfield, Cairns, & Wright, 2015; Webb, 2017). Igor Ansoff (1975) called the early, incomplete, ambiguous manifestation of strategically relevant information a weak signal; for his part, Graham Molitor (2018) modeled how issues accumulate critical mass; and John Naisbitt (1982) brought military intelligence methods into business, aggregating mentions across thousands of local news stories to infer patterns without statistical validation. The device here is scanning, together with a habit that outlived its origins: treating frequency of mention as evidence of magnitude.
The third lineage took shape in the creative ecosystem. Elsa Laurent (2018) dates its origin to Paris in 1947, when Fred Carlin founded the Comité français de la couleur, the seed of what would become Carlin International. In 1958, Maïmé Arnodin left Jardin des Modes, where she had risen from staff writer to deputy director, and around 1960 she set up her own consultancy for ready-to-wear manufacturers, producing cahiers de coloris that forecast palettes some eighteen months ahead. Laurent credits her with the first trend cahier in the form we recognize today, in 1963: compilations of images, colors, silhouettes, and texts intended to anticipate consumer tastes. The French bureaux de style consolidated over the following decades. Promostyl opened in 1966 under Françoise Vincent-Ricard; Arnodin and Denise Fayolle founded Mafia in 1968, Dominique Peclers left the Printemps style office to start her own bureau in 1970, and Nelly Rodi followed in 1985. In 1997, Malcolm Gladwell brought coolhunting to a wide readership, describing how the pursuit of what is coming next had been professionalized through close, street-level observation; from my perspective, that approach focuses on users while revolving around the cultural industries. This lineage bequeathed the trend book as a format (and also as a precious fetish), and with it, classificatory authority concentrated in a handful of capitals and an annual editorial calendar which apparently decides when change occurs.
These ways of seeing change hybridized as the global trends market expanded, from Vejlgaard’s trendsetting actors (2008) and Horx’s megatrends (2011) to Hiltunen’s semiotic signals (2008) and Dragt’s guidelines for teaching the practice (2017, 2023). Taken together, these origins whisper that the field is polygenetic while its center of gravity sits in developed economies. What circulated in Latin America, translated and taught, was a narrower selection of it, although not only that.
Modes of reinscription
In what ways did these approaches influence practices in the region? Foreign trade was a major driver, as was the consumption of reports published by international agencies. Trade shows and export promotion agencies were among the first to adopt these practices, which continued through training, specialized publications, podcasts, and other sources. Several Latin American analysts studied abroad and then returned to open consultancies or join innovation departments. Foreign consultants also traveled to the region to teach.
In her doctoral thesis in sociology (2012), Miqueli Michetti documents these channels for the Brazilian case. Rhodia’s Coordenação Industrial Têxtil, created in the late 1970s to supply Brazilian textile firms with style direction and color charts, brought Marie Rucki to the country for annual courses at Casa Rhodia. Rucki directed Studio Berçot, the Paris fashion school she took over in 1971, and trained firms and designers to assemble cadernos de tendências. In 1976, Gilda Chataignier opened a Bureau de Style in Rio de Janeiro that offered fashion consultancy and produced trend cahiers. Michetti also illustrates how classification authority is concentrated today. Agencies deploy researchers worldwide to collect diverse information, yet their headquarters remain in major cities like Paris, London, and New York. From these locations, they can filter and rank the material. Michetti explicitly rejects the cultural-diffusion model, in which certain centers impose their will on a periphery. I agree with her. Building on her findings, I would argue that reproducing many official futures requires no external imposition, only an authority bias that nudges because no single official Global North future exists.
This nudge operates in at least two modes. The first is re-inscription by importation. A report produced elsewhere is consumed, translated, or excerpted, and its macro-themes are applied to a Latin American geography, with changed examples and an intact framework. Dario Caldas denounced this practice from within the industry, coining the term “marketing-difusão” and urging Brazilian professionals to stop importing foreign reports and start producing their own. His Observatório de Sinais (2004) offers an alternative method of signal reading grounded in semiotics. Two decades later, this critique is evident; for example, Kantar’s 2026 marketing trends report presents ten global patterns, each concluding with a section titled “How Kantar Can Help,” thereby revealing the commercial purpose of the document (Kantar, 2025).
The second mode is endogenous re-inscription, which is harder to see because it carries all the credentials of local authorship. VML’s regional chief strategy officer signs the Latin American edition of The Future 100 for 2026. It is based on a survey of 3,982 adults in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico (VML Intelligence, 2026). The fieldwork is regional, but the franchise provides the format, generational segmentation, and framework. Almost every figure is reported against a global average that serves as the baseline. Four countries stand in for a region with more than twenty countries. In the entry on Treatonomics, a British psychologist quoted by the agency’s global intelligence unit explains Latin American Gen Z spending. This pattern appears under the same name among the ten global trends in the Kantar report. Neither document is copying the other. Both draw on a shared repertoire whose center of gravity lies elsewhere, and the local edition supplies evidence confirming this.
I have a confession to make. I set out to research how trend analysis reached Latin America because I assumed it had been imported from developed countries. That is partly true. However, ECLAC was already analyzing patterns of change in its first Economic Survey of Latin America (CEPAL, 1949). Thus, the region produced its own analyses decades before the Parisian trend books arrived. I did not consider that Latin American stakeholders might have developed the practice on their own terms. I suspect this is the most common form an official future takes: an assumption so natural that it never announces itself.
Latin America has not merely received analytical models. The region’s lineages and its analysts’ creativity have given rise to entities of various scales that adapt and reinvent trends as much as they reproduce them. A quick review of consultancies, civil society organizations, government agencies, and educational institutions reveals more than 140 actors worldwide (Paniagua, 2026).
I want to emphasize that I am not opposed to using models from other cultural contexts, nor am I concerned with methodological purity. What concerns me is whether unreflectively using certain assumptions we take for granted might reproduce conceptions of the future that we never question: official futures that we simply accept.
The chain of limiting beliefs
In clear homage to Ogburn’s approach, trends are often mistaken for predictions, maybe because of the desire for certainty. Rather than being viewed as patterns that may present threats or opportunities depending on the reader, trends are taken out of context and strongly tied to consumption. Readers then can interpret them as recommendations for desirable behaviors.
A bias of scale compounds this prescriptive shift. Trends are often understood as global, unilinear, inevitable, irreversible, and equally desirable for all of humanity when, in reality, they coexist, diverge, stagnate, or regress depending on the context in which they are observed (assuming there is a forward and a backward). This bias also has a geographic dimension since trends identified in the so-called global North are read as the future of the global South, and vice versa (Oglesby, 1969). It is as if one bloc is destined to catch up to a stage the other has already reached. The global average used as a baseline is this bias in its most economical form.
Added to this is that the methods used to compile these reports are not always disclosed, and trends seem to reset every year despite describing medium- and long-term processes. This makes it seem as if social change follows the editorial calendar of those who publish it. Some reports rest on aspirations rather than verified facts and describe the world their authors or sponsor brands want to see. This synthesis is often tied to generational behaviors (e.g., Baby Boomers, Millennials, and Zennials), as if age alone could explain and predict how human groups act, like zodiac signs. This explanation leaves out factors such as education, gender, social capital, and life course, among others.
A further limitation compounds these issues. Facts can be mistaken for opinions or hype, and media buzz can replace evidence of magnitude without distinguishing noise from underlying patterns, as Ogburn warned a century ago. The false consensus effect exacerbates this issue by assuming that everyone reacts alike to the same stimulus, even though people have different thresholds for action (Sunstein, 2019). Each habit treats a population’s response as monolithic, even though the future is plural and contested.
So, how might trend analysis contribute to reproducing the official future assumed to be a country’s or region’s destiny? Precisely through this chain. Trend analysis presents itself as a prediction rather than a description. It conceals its method and point of enunciation. It reproduces, without critical mediation, the interpretations of change produced in the Global North. Not always, but I acknowledge that. Trend analysis stops working as a tool for open conjecture. It becomes a mechanism of normalization.
Some answers, and their limits
What solutions are possible? In 2022, I edited the Kjaer Trend Atlas Latam, which is a reimagining of the Kjaer Trend Atlas. The latter is a collection of global trends periodically published by the Danish consultancy firm Kjaer Global. The firm and the sixth cohort of CENTRO’s Design of Tomorrow specialization program collaborated for this experiment, which was published in the scientific journal Economía Creativa (Kjaer et al., 2022). Students selected eleven macro trends from the agency’s existing atlas of fifty-four. Between July and October of that year, they researched these trends in a Latin American context using academic sources, the press, stakeholder interviews, and participant observation. The document reports on the desk research and fieldwork, stating that the findings delineated each trend in a new context and sometimes ran counter to its original formulation.
This is a partial answer. If everything begins with framing, the framing was ready-made. The collection of fifty-four patterns and the dimensions used to describe them were in place before the fieldwork began. The local work populated a structure that was not built. The exercise establishes that selecting patterns for investigation is a situated act of framing and that allowing evidence to contradict the original formulation is when evidence contradicts the original formulation. This observation concerns the exercise’s design, not the quality of the collaboration. I am a huge fan of this firm.
A fuller answer requires us to fix the order of operations, a topic I cover in my course on researching trends. This is not the ultimate solution, but we are working toward different results.
The sequence I teach is the same one I use as a consultant. Everything begins with a situated question stated plainly enough for someone else to contest its framing (For example, how have multiple sclerosis and its treatment changed in Mexico?). From there, the analyst builds a knowledge base with one entry per discrete event, arranged in rows and columns so that the material can be searched and cross-referenced. Following the traditional method of structuring this type of data, the first columns record the fact and the argument for its relevance (‘What?’ and ‘So what?’). Additional information includes the location, date of occurrence, stakeholders, and domain.
Decolonial work involves balancing sources, and it is mostly unglamorous. Entries drawn from the context under study must predominate. Documentary and field sources are kept in proportion, incorporating testimonies, direct observation, social media, forums, blogs, news and radio, and articles and reports. This includes grassroots information in the style of coolhunters (though not necessarily for the fashion industry) and testimonies based on expertise gained through lived experience. Search engines are varied on purpose. The database goes back at least a decade, revealing the sector’s eras, and grows until it reaches categorical exhaustion. Eventually, clusters of facts emerge, describing situated changes in behavior and value with specific manifestations (Dragt, 2023).
How can we achieve decolonized trends? I do not think we can fully achieve this because we are interconnected in so many ways. Events in a local context do not occur in isolation from the global context. In fact, trend analysis involves recognizing the connection between local change and large-scale global forces.
We consistently and systematically look for local milestones that help us understand change, ensuring local milestones outnumber global ones. We also deliberately avoid using pre-established grand narratives (e.g., the rise of digital transformation) to explain local changes, whenever possible. This kind of self-aware, sustained calibration involves acknowledging global scale narratives about a desirable future and questioning the analyst’s stance toward them.
Only then are patterns named, and each one is validated before being narrated. Considerable time is devoted to what is not changing and to forces running counter to the already identified pattern, because change is not global, unidirectional, nor evolutionary.
The final result is published in the Dictionary of Signals and Trends series, an annual volume edited by CENTRO since 2022. More recently, we have produced editions for specific domains (Tur, Vázquez & Paniagua, 2022; Paniagua, 2023, 2025; Tur & Paniagua, 2024; Paniagua & Tur, 2025; Paniagua & Sada, 2025; Paniagua & Hernández, 2026).
Our contribution to decolonizing our readings is modest and procedural. First, the territory is read, and whatever large force is at work becomes legible through what that territory shows rather than through a name supplied elsewhere. A pattern produced this way responds to the place it came from.
No protocol can remove the analyst. Each of us carries a personal algorithm: tacit rules formed through training, background, gender, beliefs, and context, which determine which questions are asked and which facts appear relevant. I ask for the discipline of making the selection and classification criteria explicit within the base itself and of interrogating one’s own blind spots using the same method one uses to hunt for signals. This is perhaps the most challenging part of publicly acknowledging the subjectivity inherent in the exercise (Devereux, 1967).
Trend analysis is a subjective, discursive exercise, and I consider this a strength because it implies that a historical subject observes reality, documents change within its context, and narrates the findings, as any behavioral scientist publishing results open to criticism would do. This is rarely acknowledged when discussing trends; instead, it is presented under a rhetoric of objectivity that obscures the underlying interpretive decisions.
In the end, normalization is not something that trend analysis does to us from outside. It becomes what it is when the question is borrowed, the method is not declared, and the analyst disappears behind the report. The remedy is to state your position, explain your approach, and allow the territory to respond first. An approach that embraces subjectivity, rigor, and fieldwork can challenge the official narrative, rather than simply reproducing it.
Author:
Karla Paniagua, Centro de diseño, cine y televisión
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Statement on the Use of Generative AI. This paper used DeepL to improve the translation of some terms, Grammarly to correct spelling and syntax, and Claude (Anthropic) to verify bibliographic sources, format references according to APA 7 guidelines, and review the structure of the revised manuscript against the reviewer’s comments, with prompts of the type: “verify this reference and format it in APA 7”; “check the spelling and grammar of this paragraph”; “look for typos”. The author takes full responsibility for the writing, argument, and conclusions of this article.
