Doing it Together

Today I met with New York designer and trend forecaster Neville Bean  for the first time. We had a great chat over coffee at Village institution Tartine about the future of forecasting. We discussed quite a few topics, (thanks Neville for introducing me to biomimicry!) and both agreed that collaboration amongst trend professionals and a more transparent atmosphere in the industry would go a long way to promoting the benefits of trend services in a wider global market-place. Hopefully, hall five will be a useful tool for connecting like-minded people all over the world. 

Later, as I sat down to write and still feeling inspired by my conversation with Neville, lo and behold, I found an interesting and relevant post on Dutch blog Fashion Future which poses the following question,

"Are we shifting from a D.I.Y. to a D.I.T. culture?" 

You can read the article for yourself but here are some interesting observations. 

A DIT culture is made of a large amount of diversified and talented people working together. The DIT movement can also be called an open-source movement that is based on social productivity. ‘Social productivity’. is a form of inter-personal exchange founded on the notion of reciprocity’. Open source websites such as: Wiki, Torrent, and Ebay have generated a vice versa transmission for sharing knowledge, ideas, information, files and selling products. The open-source movement has created a DIT platform for individuals to represent themselves. A great example is Etsy.com. Etsy is a platform for designers to sell their handmade products. Etsy allows amateurs to take on a role of a professional but also of an entrepreneur which creates a lot of opportunities, also for the fashion industry.

So in the words of Canned Heat (1970) 

Together we'll stand
Divided we'll fall
Come on now people
Let's get on the ball
And work together

We are just a few weeks away now from the launch of the hall five website! In the meantime you can follow our progress here on the blog, on Twitter and on LinkedIn 

See you in hall five, a place to meet trend forecasters.