This Week’s Project. - 007

2026 will be a big year for early-2000s Digicams.

Happy belated New Year! I hope 2026 is everything you want it to be and more. Or as they say where I’m from ‘Aaaaaaaahhhll the best’.

I’m a sucker for a New Years Resolution, always have been. That’s how I became the shredded, incredibly disciplined, peak athlete writing to you now (maybe one day…).

But my New Years Resolutions this year aren’t so much resolutions, as a few changes to my business and creative life that I’ve been debating for a while now. Primarily, it’s a re-orientation towards making useful things and hopefully showing others the process of making useful things.

I’ve been working a lot in AI recently and while it’s an absolutely astounding technology, we are about to be hit by a tidal wave of AI generated content that will be unlike anything we’ve experienced before. It already feels to me that there’s too much AI (This brand just annnounced an AI Hoover at CES) and this is really, truly just the beginning of this. It’s about to get a whooooole lot worse. That’s a pretty doomer outlook for a new year email isn’t it?

I’m aware that working a lot in AI is exposing me to a lot more of this than the average person, but I have a good nose for trends. And my nose is telling me a backlash is already on the way. Gen-Z are already bidding up the prices for original iPods, Digicams and early 2000s devices as these all had a very identifiable aesthetic and because of their early-digital-tech flaws they feel real.

Trends in fashion and design follow a couple of rules (according to me, at least).

1: Backlash Trends - These are pretty easy to predict. When something like a new technology or idea comes out of the blue and occupies every waking moment of the culture (see AI at the moment), there’s always a backlash to this pervasiveness. People get sick of hearing about it, they get bored of it. And they are repelled by the mere mention of it and tend to seek exactly the opposite of the thing that is being forced upon them.

2: Cyclical Trends - Cyclical Trends are a bit harder to predict and quantify in terms of what those trends will end up being, but the theory that seems to hold true with them is that every generation will bring back elements of the culture 20-25 years before their own. Hence cyclical.

My theory for why this is, is that when we’re young, we often have idols. Be they cool cousins, particular film stars, movies or tv that stick in the collective psyche of a generation. And when this generation starts to enter the job market, this is their frame of reference and those elements start to re-emerge through the lens of that new crop of culture-makers.

All that is a long winded way of saying that the combination of backlash trends and Cyclical Trends mean that we’re about to see a resurgence of Flawed Tech. Think cameras with no image-stabilisation, low resolution. iPods, portable CD Players or even my personal favourite Minidiscs. Stuff that feels real, doesn’t connect to the internet and hasn’t been corrupted by AI.

This is the trend I see coming inexorably down the road. And honestly, great. Mid-2000s Sony design was incredible and I’m excited to see those influences re-emerge. But for me and my business over 2026, I’m going to be looking at something I’m calling Personal Tech. I’ve got a few different projects in the works that focus on this, there’ll undoubtedly be some AI used in there, but the AI won’t be the product. The things I'm planning to make will hopefully feel real and they will undoubtedly be flawed as I’m not a machine.

I'll leave you with a photo of the last thing I made in 2025, very human-made I think you'll agree.

Have a good one!

Liam

✌🏼

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💡This Week’s Idea

What if QWERTY keyboard phones are making a comeback?

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The Clicks Power Keys and Communicator were announced at CES and the hype that has followed seems to have taken everyone by surprise, so much so that another company announced a competitor this week.

I for one miss my BlackBerry enough to be pretty excited by this development.