Design trend forecasting by combining conceptual analysis and semantic projections

Trend analysis and forecasting is an indispensable task in the preparation of projects in almost any field of business activity. For example, it is essential in the planning of new commercial products and in industrial or artistic design.

The article we present today aims to facilitate access to understanding the technical part of the process, motivated by the fact that the blind use of an electronic platform is generally not a good way to use such a sophisticated tool.

This scientific article has been prepared by Alessandro Manetti, Antonia Ferrer Sapena, Enrique A. Sánchez Pérez and Pablo Lara Navarra, the latter member of the Management & e-Learning (MeL) research group. The article was published in the Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity in 2021.

Objectives and Methodology

This article describes a new method of trend analysis and forecasting (Deflexor), which aims to help inform decisions in almost any field of human social activity, including, for example, business, art and design. As a result of the combination of conceptual analysis, fuzzy mathematics and some new reinforcement learning methods, the article proposes an automatic procedure based on Big Data that provides an evaluation of the evolution of design trends.

Results

The resulting tool can be used to study general trends in any field, depending on the data sets used. While allowing the evaluation of the future acceptance of a particular design product, becoming in this way, a new instrument for Open Innovation.

The mathematical characterization of what is a semantic projection, together with the use of the theory of Lipschitz functions in metric spaces, provides a broad-spectrum predictive tool. Although the results depend on the data sets used, the periods of updating and the sources of general information, the model allows for the creation of specific tools for trend analysis in particular fields that are adaptable to different environments.

Consult the study

You can consult the article for free by clicking on this link.