RADAR Member Spotlight .004: Sarah
Critical ignoring, ethnography, and biomonitoring with @sarahsarahowen
Welcome to the RADAR member spotlights series, highlighting some of the brilliant folks from inside our community. We’ll go deep on topics our members have been fascinated by, learning from their experiences and experiments as we dive down the rabbit hole.
Futurists are often imagined cartoonishly, caricatures of sci-fi figures surrounded by the latest tech and wacky gadgets. But in reality futures, as a field of study, is as much – if not more – about humans as it is about technology. Particularly at RADAR, futures work is about understanding people, identifying and uncovering the cultural shifts emerging in our world before they gain visibility to the masses.
Sarah, or @sarahsarahowen as we know her in the server, has built a career in futures on just that. Beginning her career in journalism before making her way to trend forecasting, and boasting a Masters degree in Sociology; cultural analysis and an understanding of people is core to Sarah’s approach.
If you’ve ever wondered, just how does someone become a futurist – Sarah’s journey is one to follow and learn from.
Sarah is the founder of SOON Future Studies where she acts as Global Futures Director, based in Lisbon, Portugal. Her global journey through culture and trends spans multiple continents, prioritizes depth and breadth in sources, and harbors a penchant – that we’re big fans of – for taking research into the wild.
Let’s get to know you a little. How has your journey ebbed and flowed to get you to where you are now?
It certainly hasn’t been a linear journey, or a planned out one. There’s been an unintentional mix of luck, timing, and perseverance. In retrospect, I was definitely manifesting working in futures as a teen, way before I learned about it as a practice. I remember being a young girl - maybe 13 or so - living in rural Australia, scrapbooking the hell out of magazines with a vision of living in NYC. Fast forward 7 years, and I had graduated with a degree in creative industries – a blend of culture, sociology, and journalism studies – hustled countless gigs and work experiences, and was able to land an internship at Vogue in NYC. This was the beginning of my unexpected journey to the US. I bounced between big publishers like NYT and NYmag, and eventually started in a junior role at WGSN where I cut my teeth in trend forecasting. That chapter lasted a decade and had me mostly studying youth culture trends from around the world. During the later part of that period, I obtained a Masters in Sociology and moved on to co-found SOON Future Studies where I act as Global Futures Director, based in Lisbon, Portugal.
We’d all like to think that we’d be good researchers if given the chance, but struggle to achieve rigor and avoid bias when push comes to shove. What are some of the unsung techniques and approaches you’ve come to enjoy from your job?
Research methods are always interesting, because the process often leads to a singular outlook. While there might be a single theoretical approach to how you’d uncover insights, the outcome can end up looking wildly different depending on the person doing it. I’ve always been a fan of taking the research out in the wild, so to speak; of extending my curiosity and analysis beyond what can be discovered through a screen. It’s about immersing yourself in sectors, scenes, or subcultures that one wouldn’t necessarily be comfortable in, and about intently studying the world with as much objectivity, curiosity, and openness as possible. I prefer more ethnographic or longitudinal approaches to research.
I used to cover SXSW and Coachella every year for work, and documented the evolving aesthetic, attitudinal, and cultural trends – music scenes, emerging communities, etc. That became a fascinating project because over time, I would often spot the same people throughout the years and be able to engage with them in a way that brought context to the situation - I knew what they wore last year, which bands they were going to see, how their values were changing, and even took notice of how their circle of friends evolved. I even watched one of these individuals grow up, in a sense, and we’ve stayed in touch ever since. That’s a long time for someone you meet and document in passing at a festival! It was interesting watching her progress from a 14-year-old Coachella fan girl to a graduate of NYU (shoutout to Wesley 😊).
How do you handle the overwhelming amount of information out there on the internet? Do you have your own approach to focusing on what matters most?
It’s one part optimization, one part organization or curation. I’ve been scanning and scrapping the internet for over a decade for work, and picked up a few tricks along the way to help me streamline the process. I have different email inboxes for organizing newsletters, I use platforms like Notion, Discord, Airtable, and Miro to curate trends, themes, or general patterns from around the web. I do monthly clean-ups and “filing” of my mobile screenshots and Instagram saves. I’ve trained my eye to cut through the noise and the BS that’s out there. I keep my sources diverse in both breadth and depth but have also had to let go of the idea that I can read it all – nowadays, I embrace manically closing a window of 50 tabs without hesitation or regret. There’s a great tweet that @keels223 shared about the concept of ‘critical ignoring’:
In an age of information overabundance, critical ignoring is as important as critical thinking.
Knowing what to ignore might very well become one of the most important skills we’ll have to hone for the coming decade.
A common criticism people express when talking about research-backed data is that too much reliance on data can be cold and unfeeling. What kind of variables do you consider to inject those numbers with a human touch?
I remember being at the SXSW Interactive conference in 2016 when the headline “data is the new oil” was getting thrown around. That certainly felt true then but now, barely 7 years later, we’re drowning in data. In this regard, the future of luxury is context. I could find you a data point on the internet that could back up both sides of any argument. The value here is truly understanding human behavior alongside more macro-environmental drivers of change to develop a thesis you can support. We’re also entering the age of instinct so I think we’ll pad out our previous data-heavy society with a bit more appreciation for intuition and instinct.
Finally, as is tradition, what are some rabbit holes you’ve been exploring on your own lately?
Biomonitoring: the last decade was all about the quantified self: this idea that we could - and actively wanted to - track our steps, sleep, and calories. Lately I’ve been diving more into biomonitoring advancements which push us into new territory. Wearables, and ingestibles even, are evolving so much – not to mention the range of at-home tools and tech that allows us to collect our own biometrics ( think smart toilets like Toto’s stool analyzing one or urine tests like Vivoo). This decade, we’ll crave self-sovereignty over our healthcare, and technology will deliver to allow us to know more about our bodies and have the control and knowledge to act on it autonomously.
Products to Artifacts: Not too long ago,I wrote about an early paradigm shift I was observing, highlighting our changing attitudes towards “stuff”. Conscious consumerism was already in the mainstream but it felt like a new non-negotiable was bubbling. Durability is a new non-negotiable when it comes to the future of design. People, despite being value-driven, will demand a higher quality than they have in the past. Intentional design ushers in the idea of "buy less but buy better", and the shift is manifesting across fashion, lifestyle, and interiors. One of the coolest signals I’ve seen in this space is by a dying company, Kyoto Montsuki in Japan, which offers a rewear service that takes your old, faded (or stained) clothes and dyes them black to bring them back to life - or at least create a bold new one for your clothes. There was also an op-ed in the Financial Times at the start of this year called “Why I’m Only Buying 5 New Things in 2023,” which definitely felt like it captured this shift in buying less but buying better.
Chatting with Sarah always expands our point of view, reminding us to take a step back and consider the broader forces at play in an emerging idea. “The future of luxury is context” is going to be ringing in our ears for the foreseeable future. Sarah is part of the research squad at RADAR – you can see her brilliant influence across our publications including A Future in Sync and our upcoming Play report. Readers, you can keep up with Sarah on Twitter at @sarahsarahowen, and learn more about her work at SOON at www.soonfutures.com.
Kudos!