Analyzing Trends is written by Tim Stock (https://www.linkedin.com/in/timstock/) and Marie Lena Tupot (https://www.linkedin.com/in/marielenatupot/), co-founders of scenarioDNA (http://scenariodna.com/), a cultural research and intelligence consultancy. Drawing on more than three decades of global fieldwork, semiotics, cultural mapping, futures analysis, and AI-assisted research, they examine how social change takes form through language, media, consumer behavior, technology, brands, and institutions. Their essays identify the cultural systems producing trends, explain how meanings change across markets and communities, and translate those findings into implications for strategy, innovation, policy, and design. Stock and Tupot are the authors of Story Systems and Cultural Research: A Mixed-Methods Guide to Forecasting Social Change (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1041108443?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback).
This fall, two randomized trials of AI tutors pointed in opposite directions. Maryland undergraduates who were offered a tutor in their course finished with lower grades, while secondary students in England who revised with a tutor scored higher. Both results are real, and both come with details a headline drops: the Maryland tutor gave direct explanations by default, and only about one in seven students offered it ever used it. This episode follows a finding like that as it loses its conditions on the way into a scenario, and gives the result a name: a foresight hallucination. Joseph Voros's futures cone and Nele Fischer and Sascha Dannenberg's work on plausibility show where a team's assumptions about the present go unrecorded. The 2024 Wharton and Harvard tutoring studies show how two well-built experiments became opposite headlines. Fabricated citations get caught when someone looks them up, but a foresight hallucination cites real studies, so the only defense is keeping each finding attached to the conditions that produced it.
17 Oct 2026
The Infinite Table
Cultural research has more signal than structure, and the loudest signal usually sets the story. Knolling, the studio habit of squaring every tool on one surface so each can be seen at once, gives analysts a way to slow that stream down. Laid flat, signals show what they share and what is missing.
Charles Sanders Peirce, a mathematician and logician, treated meaning as a relation that shows up in what people do. His logic of abduction starts from the item that fits no group. The pertinent negative, a term borrowed from emergency medicine, trains the eye to record what should be in a scene and is not. Together they turn choices that look irrational into evidence about what a group values.
AI tools sort everything into equal rows. An analyst lays that output on the same table, checks what it repeats and what it leaves out, and knolls again next season to see whether the outlier has found neighbors.
scenarioDNA Cultural Intelligence Workshop Series
Story Systems and Cultural Research
15 Oct 2026
Super is the New Smart
Donald Trump told the UN General Assembly that artificial intelligence would now be called super intelligence, saying the word artificial makes AI sound fake. The word artificial describes where the technology came from, and the word super describes where it ranks. We trace the adjective's history from Gulf War smart bombs to smartphones and smart homes, and look at what happens when a machine borrows the words we use to praise people. Research on algorithm appreciation and algorithm aversion shows how a label changes the weight people give to machine advice. Pew Research Center data on smartphone overuse and an experiment in blocking mobile internet point toward a different ideal. Stanford's AI Index calls the current state of AI jagged intelligence. Models that reach gold-medal level in Olympiad mathematics misread an analog clock about half the time. The counter-ideal to smart technology is bounded technology: devices that do a defined job and can be switched off.
scenarioDNA Cultural intelligence
Semiotics | Foresight | Narrative Intelligence
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Dr Anya Sharma
Dr Kenji Tanaka
Dr Sarah Chen
Dr Alex Chen
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