How will we live, work and consume in a post-pandemic world? What did we learn from this year and how will it affect the creative industries? TNE assesses the changes shaping our future.
SPENCER BAILEY
Editor and journalist “I think we’re moving into a culture of longer-term thinking. Or that’s my hope, anyway. Companies will increasingly strive to find a healthy middle ground to be able to produce quality at scale. We’ll see more and more local initiatives and local production. There is going to be a lot of focus on the climate crisis, and on finding sound solutions for products that follow a cradle-to-grave approach. Companies will need to be fully transparent; future generations will demand to know exactly what they’re buying, a product’s estimated life cycle and how to dispose of it or pass it on after use. On the whole, we need more designs that last, that are made of high quality and that stand the test of time. Collectively, as companies and individuals – as a world – we all need to slow down. The best ideas take time, they require struggle and trial and error.
I think we will all carry the experience of Covid-19 with us for the rest of our lives. We will always remember the quarantine and lockdown, and dealing with things such as mourning, grief, loneliness, financial burden or unemployment. I hope it will make us realise that we need to take better care of each other and our planet, and that we need to live slower, healthier, more resilient lives. I think we will see a generation grow up wanting less but better: less but better content, less but better food, less but better everything. We will see a cultural shift where people don’t want to own so many things, and where it becomes more important to contribute to the collective good, to be part of a community, as opposed to living these fractured, consumer-driven lives we’ve been sucked into.
The media industry has gone through an incredible upheaval over the past decade. We’ve seen a mass consolidation of big media companies and an opening for smaller, more nimble ones. There’s been a democratisation through social media. Anybody who wants to have a platform can have one, which has made it all the more important to follow platforms you trust. Forward-thinking media companies will increasingly organise themselves around wor
