Since the 1980's Faith Popcorn and her organisation BrainsReserve has been tracking changes in consumer lives using trend forecasting.
Faith Popcorn uses cultural brailing as one of her techniques to predict a trend, this is done by taking everything that you hear, see and taste and taking inspiration from this to detect changes. This requires you to be completely observant in your surroundings by asking yourself simple questions such as who started the trend? and where it came from? These questions need to be answered to be able to understand what the trend is.