Don’t believe what they tell you about the future – Beyond X Howard Saunders

If there was one message from our evening with Howard Saunders, it was this: be very suspicious of anyone who tells you they know what the future looks like.

Retail has seen this movie before.

When Amazon Go appeared, “Just Walk Out” looked like the future of physical retail: walk in, pick up what you want and simply leave. But the story evolved. Amazon subsequently closed its Amazon Go stores, while continuing to deploy the underlying checkout technology in other environments.

Then came NFTs. For a moment, it seemed every brand needed an NFT or Web3 strategy. Nike acquired digital sneaker studio RTFKT, while brands including Prada, Gucci and Tiffany experimented with digital products and collectables.

These weren’t necessarily bad ideas. The lesson is that the future rarely arrives in the form we predict.

AI will undoubtedly transform retail and shopping centres. But precisely how? Nobody really knows.

So perhaps the smartest strategy isn’t predicting the future. It’s creating places flexible enough to respond to whatever comes next.

That means thinking about flexibility at every level: units that can expand, contract or combine; public spaces capable of hosting different activities; infrastructure that can accommodate new technology; and environments that can change without requiring major reinvestment every few years.

It also changes the role of designers.

Our job becomes less about creating a single finished solution and more about creating a framework for constant evolution. We need to think about what a space could become, not simply what it needs to be today.

Because if the pace of technological change continues to accelerate, the ability to adapt may become one of the most valuable assets a shopping centre can have.

The most successful shopping centres may not be those that predict the future most accurately.

They may simply be the ones designed to change fastest when the future arrives.