Henley launches Consumer Futures Lab

What will you be buying and using in 5, 10 or 20 years? These are big questions for Henley’s new Consumer Futures Lab. Combining rigorous interdisciplinary research with practical applications, the Lab brings together Henley academics and organisations to address the needs of consumers in the future.

The Lab will take a particular interest in the effects of emerging technologies on issues of consumers’ wellbeing; an inclusive society; and on ecologically sustainable consumption.

However, it won’t just be involved in “big picture” questions; often the best predictions about future consumer behaviour come from understanding the micro-details of human behaviour. Recent interest in consumer uses for Artificial Intelligence (AI) has often been driven by hardware developers. The Lab takes a multi-disciplinary perspective, and often it is the perspectives of sociologists and psychologists which win out in predicting future consumption behaviours.

And so, a group of lab researchers is currently working on funded projects to study consumer behaviour, including a project for the Department of Health and Social Care, Adult Social Care Technology Fund to better understand how elderly people interact with social robots. These have great potential to reduce staffing problems in the NHS, and to help elderly people lead more active lives in their own homes.

But how will the users of this potentially game changing equipment actually engage with it? There have been many cases over the years of new product developments which have been trashed in the few minutes that it took consumers to evaluate them – think of Google glasses, Philips Laserdisc, Samsung Bixby and 3D TV.

The Lab is a hype free zone where high-quality research comes first. Only a couple of years ago, the “metaverse” was talked up as a future technology which will dominate our lives, but the hype has quietly subsided as attention has been refocused on the latest big new idea.

One reason for new technologies not meeting their potential is often a lack of detailed understanding of how consumers will react to them. Innovations tend to work best where they fulfil a latent need of consumers, and it is a task for the Lab to discover how these needs will influence adoption of new technologies.

Members of the Lab disseminate new knowledge through engagement with academic, business, not-for-profit and governmental communities; through published outputs, events and through teaching activities. It welcomes collaboration with key stakeholders in the future of consumption.

Further information about the Lab can be found here.