When looking at this World Cup Top 11 several strands struck me as immediately recognizable: compassion, narratives and community. These are major mentality movements that are cyclical in nature and thus never truly fade away. They just keep appearing in different forms and always co-constitutive of other movements. The findings in this top 11 present us with intersections of different desires and needs that simultaneously transcend cultural borders but are instantly recognizable as particular to Africa and to the World Cup being in Africa. Let’s not forget that that is why we are looking at Africa in the first place now. It’s not because of civil wars or famine or AIDS as is usually the case when speaking of Africa. On this list there is only specific reference to that troubled and troubling image of Africa but more on that below. These three major mentality movements paint a picture of the creation of a future, the remembrance of legacies and the creation of future legacies.

With the World Cup behind us and Spain and South Africa both crowned as victors, we now move onto our Cool Edition July ’10. In this new top 15 Cycle we once again have finds brought to us by our worldwide network of trendfilters and coolhunters. Among others we have an amazing project in Seoul (South Korea) brought to us by prof. Don Ryun Chang and Joe Pine’s discovery of a holistic workspace in Chicago (USA). Both finds deal with new developments in work and education and are both looking towards the future, be it your personal health future or a countries future through its students.

What we also have is a final analysis of our World Cup Top 11. From time to time we ask (trend)professionals to analyze our Top-15s. For the World Cup Top-11 our very own Quinsy Gario has analyzed our list. He is one of our up and coming trend analysts and had the daunting task of placing the findings in the list in a larger framework of worldwide social, ideological and cultural movements.