Back in February, the Trend Atelier launched its first FUTURE VISION with the exploration of Rewilding. Our overarching 2021 theme is:

"The biggest innovation is philosophical"

Rewilding set the tone for all of our events in February, from our Future Vision, Reading club, Live Session, to our monthly workshop.

So what exactly is Rewilding?

In short, Rewilding means to return a non-wild area back to the wild. It is a conservation effort aimed at restoring and protecting natural processes and wilderness areas. An action that unfolds through time, agency being passed over from humans to nature. — Rewilding a place in order for it to become self-wilded.

Human Beings often have this reinforced sense that they are somehow apart from the natural world. We forget our place in Nature and the implication that every being in the whole world has through their actions. Everything is always changing everything else. We eat, drink, sleep, move, which makes us messy, interconnected, everywhere…! Integrated within an ecosystem, overlapping other ecosystems which are larger and further away.

The Rewilding movement is about allowing for the messiness of the interrelations between species, to do away with fixed outcomes, abandon preservation and look to the future and the unknown, to let Nature take its course.

“Rewilding” is a Macro Trend with its first roots in the 90s, when it was created by nature conservationists. Thereby its most common use has been in urbanism and architecture but, as a concept and practice, it is now manifesting itself across industries; emerging but set to impact the long term future as it starts to bleed and influence thinkers, designers, across a number of areas, affecting art, design, wellness, beauty as well as infrastructures and philosophical approaches to society.

Throughout the month, the Trend Atelier community, shared its thoughts, ideas, observations, structured through its events and its dedicated Future Vision board where we could all interact freely and let ideas fuse, also looking at the idea of Rewilding as a philosophy, Rewilding our thinking, our economies…

Our Q1 interactive Future Vision session was structured in 6 key directions which then dove into pioneering projects for each industry:

• Architecture — Rewilding has been promoted as a means of reconnecting people with nature, addressing the “nature deficit disorder” and ecological boredom of living in cities;

• Wellness & Beauty — When it comes to the idea of re-wilding humans, the same ideas apply; restoring us to our natural rhythms and finding ways in which to reinvigorate our wild nature and connect us to the natural environment;

• Art & Design —Rewilding requires us to give up control; art can suggest how we can actively allow non-humans to share in our creative agency;

• Media & Marketing — How new technology and data provide an opportunity for creating new ways of living based around old ways of engaging;

• Science & Tech —Rewilding as a new and progressive approach to conservation, blending radical scientific insights with practical innovations to revive ecological processes, benefiting people as well as nature;

• Future Vision — The future has arrived and has surprised us all with a pandemic that has confined us to our homes, put on hold any production activity and brought back blue skies, pure air and clean water. Modern, high-density urban housing provides ideal conditions for the rapid spread of contagion, and the planning and construction of housing could be a weapon in the fight against a pandemic.

On the last week of February, Fashion Academic, Researcher, Artist and member of our Trend Atelier Community Rachael Taylor led us through a workshop focused on inventing our own economy, pushing us outside of our normal thinking. Through Team work and exercises, we started a conversation about how to sustain your own practice without impacting people and planet. We explored different ways of thinking about economies, values, exchange networks and post growth cultures, expanding alternative ways of putting ideas into practice and what Rachael coined as “the Ripple Effect”.

In current times seeking alternatives has never been so relevant than this moment right now. As a community & school we see future forecasting as a gateway to critical decision making for the greater good of the planet & the people.

The Trend Atelier Community believes futures literacy is a powerful gateway to creating a better world for the people and the planet. We support each other with shared knowledge and resources around future forecasting and thought provoking insights.

It is now March and we are focusing on the theme of Humane Tech. We just wrapped up our Future Insights presentation, and will have our reading club next week. Every month we unpack what this complex future may look like and the role we play in it now, as well as how we can interlace defining insights into our work, to inspire others into bold thinking and action.

The Trend Atelier community is evolving, being shaped by its members in real time. It’s been a now 6 month “experiment” in the making, a blending of our insights from around the world. Most of us are from the creative industries. And most of us met through my Trend Forecasting school, and now the learning journey continues through the Trend Atelier Community.

Geraldine Wharry & the Trend Atelier Team