Rendering Reality: Consumer tribes - WGSN

Rendering Reality: Consumer tribes
Autumn/winter 2014/15

Rendering Reality
The tribe associated with the Rendering Reality trend is called Data
Believers. They believe in the truth of statistics and are beginning
to track information about themselves, particularly in the field of
health and wellness. They are pragmatic and seek to take control of
all the informational trails left behind them and make practical use
of this intelligence.

Research & Reference
Quantified self
Goal-oriented
Civic-minded
Learning
Control
New identities

Quantified self
A growing number of consumers are beginning to see the advantages of tracking and taking control of their own data.
“We’re moving towards a time when the ability to track and understand data is deeply woven into our daily lives,” says Ernesto Ramirez, community organiser for
Quantified Self, the organisation created by Kevin Kelly of Wired and Gary Wolf. www.mashable.com, October 2012

Quantified self
“Most people do not routinely record their moods, sleeping patterns or activity levels, track how much alcohol or caffeine they drink or chart how often they walk the
dog. But some people are doing just these things. They are an eclectic mix of early adopters, fitness freaks, technology evangelists, personal-development junkies,
hackers and patients suffering from a wide variety of health problems. Self-tracking may look geeky now, but the same was once true of email. And what geeks do
today, the rest of us often end up doing tomorrow.” www.economist.com, May 2012

Goal-oriented
This ability to track and quantify ourselves is increasing consumer interest in goal-oriented products and solutions.
Nowadays, people are declaring their daily goals and intentions to peers and seeking their support via social media. Companies such as Gympact and StickK operate
on accountability-based influence (ABI), a scenario in which you're judged on your actions versus your words.

Goal-oriented
“Beeminder, a ‘motivational tool that puts your money where your mouth is,’ falls into this category too, according to co-founders Daniel Reeves and Bethany Soule.
Users quantify a goal and pledge to pay money to Beeminder if they fall off the wagon.” John Havens. mashable.com, October 2012

Civic-minded
Our ability to track everything around us is encouraging a feeling of civic duty.
“uGooder provides a simple framework for tracking positive behavior (sic), wherein users gain badges for broadcasting good deeds they’ve completed. The service
also lets users print a transcript of all the good deeds they’ve ever done using the platform. ‘I thought someday this might be something people could take to a job
interview or submit with a college application to show how much good they have done,’ says Dan Lowe, uGooder’s creator. The idea is compelling – why shouldn’t
employers or schools focus on overtly positive, community-supported behavior, versus an errant photo of high school revelry?” John Havens. mashable.com, October
2012

Civic-minded
“Esther Dyson, chairman of EDventure Holdings... notes the existence of civically minded apps like Street Bump that let users take photographs of or collect data
around potholes or other citizen concerns. This community focus shows how the QS movement can provide a new layer of qualitative data on top of quantified reporting.
Think about an app wherein citizens could report their emotional state at seeing a pothole, as well as record its location. QS apps could easily aggregate these
emotional tags with obvious economic repercussions. (If you look for good schools when buying a house, wouldn’t you also check the ‘emotional history’ of a neighborhood
as well?)” John Havens. mashable.com, October 2012

Learning
In addition to our growing need for self-knowledge, people are also engaging in new ways to educate themselves about the world.
Laura Pappano notes that: “edX, the nonprofit start-up from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has 370,000 students this fall in its first official
[MOOC (massive open online)] courses. That’s nothing. Coursera, founded just last January, has reached more than 1.7 million – growing ‘faster than Facebook,’
boasts Andrew Ng, on leave from Stanford to run his for-profit MOOC provider.” www.nytimes.com, November 2012

Learning
“‘This has caught all of us by surprise,’ says David Stavens, who formed a company called Udacity with Sebastian Thrun and Michael Sokolsky after more than
150,000 signed up for Dr Thrun’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence last fall, starting the revolution that has higher education gasping. A year ago, he marvels: ‘we
were three guys in Sebastian’s living room and now we have 40 employees full time.’” Laura Pappano. www.nytimes.com, November 2012

Control
The Quantified Self movement is allowing consumers to feel more in control of their bodies and their lives.
We predict that this level of control will become the expected norm for consumers and their relationships with the world around them.

Control
“Larry Smarr, QS enthusiast and director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology at the University of California San Diego says:
‘I feel much more like I'm in control because I'm measuring it, I'm monitoring it, I'm understanding my bacteria – how it's been screwed up by antibiotics and other
things. I'm quite hopeful that over the next five, 10, 20 years, we're going to see cures for a lot of things that we currently think of as incurable.’”
www.cnn.com, September 2012

New identities
The internet is allowing people to accept and want multiple identities; all valid and all important for day-to-day existence.

New identities
“Entrepreneur Edward Aten, who founded Swift.fm, explained that the internet is now a platform for identity in an entirely new way – an identity that is fluid and that is
filtered, but a new kind of identity just the same.” gigaom.com, December 2012

Rendering Reality
Key takeaways
Consumers are becoming more interested in data, which is measurable, quantifiable
and real. In line with this, we see:
• A growth in the Quantified Self movement
• Consumers who are extremely goal-oriented
• A rise in civic duty
• A growth in consumer desire to learn, and learn in new ways
• A desire for more control by consumers
• The need for multiple identities