Technology is rewriting beauty, identity, and skin. For a global personal care leader, we translated that shift into design guidelines teams could act on today, mapping emerging needs, technology enablers, and jobs to be done against the futures forming at the intersections of today's macro trajectories.
Answers had to go beyond the next beauty trend. We had to create speculative future scenarios to create a strategy today, on how a business decides what to invest in, build, and protect, so it isn't left behind by a future it failed to see coming.
Across technology, science, and culture, identifying the signals already hinting at how technology will reshape what's possible in beauty and personal optimisation.
Clustering signals into a framework that separates the timeless psychology of beauty, the enduring human motives, from its shifting expression: where meaning holds, and where it moves.
Constructing multiple plausible futures for beauty and personal care, each surfacing the emerging human needs technology would support, detailed, usable guidelines rather than abstract forecasts.
Translating each future into strategic territories the business could design toward: jobs to be done, a vocabulary for claims and benefits, and direction for the teams building the enablers.
Speculative futures, translated into a practical toolkit that clients can start deploying to generate a pipeline in preparation for a radically different future of beauty. Opportunity territories built around core human motives, to transform, optimise, connect, and nurture, each with its own future needs, enabling technology, and jobs to be done in the future gave the product design team a roadmap to work with.
