The TREND RESEARCH tool stands out for its operational practicality. All necessary materials – the box, rigid cards, and supporting graphic elements – are simple to produce, store, and reuse. The structure makes the tool easy to bring into classrooms, workshops, or community settings: it can be used with small groups or individually, without requiring specialized equipment.
Facilitation does not require advanced technical skills but rather a capacity for attentive listening and guided observation. The role of the facilitator is to introduce the cards with sensitivity, encourage open and non-judgmental dialogue, and support learners in articulating their preferences and choices. Thanks to its adaptable format, the tool can be easily customized to reflect different cultural backgrounds, languages, and settings, ensuring effective use across a wide variety of educational and design contexts – even beyond the original scope of the project.
It is a lightweight yet powerful kit, capable of activating deep reflections with just a few well-designed elements.
These traces do not have diagnostic value, but they reveal cultural belonging, beliefs, expectations, and desires that often remain implicit in daily life. Each card acts as a narrative pretext, bringing to light what truly matters in the space we inhabit: solitude or relationship, essential objects or shared rituals, aesthetics or functionality, the need for rootedness or the desire for transformation.
This tool is inclusive and transversal: it can be used in intercultural, educational, design, or social contexts, with adults, youth, or heterogeneous groups. Its strength lies in its ability to activate a deep dialogue starting from concrete and visual choices, which reveal aspects of oneself even when designing for others.
In a time when living models are changing rapidly, TREND RESEARCH provides the opportunity to reflect critically and creatively on what it means today to “feel at home,” what needs emerge, and which scenarios we wish to build – for ourselves and the communities we inhabit.
The strength of this tool lies in its ability to reveal implicit preferences and internalized cultural choices, which often remain unexplored but significantly influence how we live in and imagine spaces. Through the card game, the comparison of micro-trends, the selection of symbolic objects, and the visualization of ideal environments, learners build an authentic and layered representation of their way of living.
Data Interpretation
The responses that emerge during the TREND RESEARCH activity should not be interpreted rigidly or in a standardized way; rather, they should be read as narrative traces that speak to the learner’s residential identity. Every choice made – among visual cards, atmospheres, objects, or concepts related to “care” – becomes a window into the learner’s cultural, emotional, and symbolic experience.
This is not about constructing a psychological profile, but about collecting meaningful indicators that can guide design toward scenarios more aligned with the users deep desires and symbolic references.
Even the way the learner handles the cards, organizes them, comments on them, or combines them provides interpretive insights: a seemingly random action can reveal an internal hierarchy, an identity narrative, or a latent design intuition.
Easily customizable and expandable ayful, and empathetic TREND RESEARCH stands out for its ability to activate a profound, accessible, and culturally aware narrative of living. Through interaction with the cards and reflection on the choices made, this tool enables learners to:
- Recognize how the ideal home is imagined – not primarily in aesthetic terms, but as a symbolic, emotional, and relational space.
- Highlight cultural, religious, or familial references that implicitly influence the way one inhabits and relates to space.
- Identify desired visions of the domestic future, such as greater sociality, autonomy, integration with nature, or protection.
- Explore the emotional relationship between objects and space, for example, by asking where a significant object would be placed in the new environment.
- These elements become valuable indicators for designing more empathetic and coherent environments that reflect the real ways people inhabit contemporary spaces.
Made with love by Wellhome team
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
