Good afternoon, David, it’s nice to meet you. Firstly, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your career?

David Matten: My domain really is trends, consumer trends. Really my obsession is with the trends reshaping the mindsets, behaviours and expectations of people out there. And I’m obsessed with this collision between a changing world, often that means new technologies and human nature. So, that collision between technologies that emerge, and between fundamental human needs and values. Where those two things meet, that’s where you get trends that reshape human behaviours, human mindsets, human expectations.

I was head of the research and analysis side of the business at a big well-known trends agency, that how I got started in this kind of world really. Now, I’m completely independent, and I write a newsletter about trends and technologies that’s called ‘New World Same Humans’, and I consult for brands and organisations about trends and foresighting the future and I speak a lot.

My deeper background even before this, really in a different lifetime now, is journalism. I started as a journalist at The Times newspaper back in the early 2000s, and I found I was writing more and more about technology, and then the iPhone happened, and it was obvious that the technology revolution was the big story of our lifetime. I was writing more and more about that, and that’s how I ended up going into the trends agency and shifting into the world I inhabit now.

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