Earlier this year, Whole Foods - the natural and organic food retailer - unveiled a prototype of its Smarter Cart, a trolley which uses an attached tablet computer and Kinect technology to monitor the grocery items being placed inside it.

The trolley is designed to help shoppers manage their weekly shop and is being trialled in Austin, Texas (with the company saying that, if it proves successful, it will seek a wider US roll-out). Using an RFID scanner, the Smarter Cart keeps track of items being selected by a customer, checking them off their list of wanted products as they move through the aisles. In addition, it keeps a running tally of the total cost and will also make recommendations about recipes or supplementary products that might complement the shopper’s list. Perhaps most interestingly, though, it will also issue alerts if a shopper selects a product by mistake (eg normal pasta instead of gluten-free).

Is this the beginning of a revolution in the way we manage our weekly grocery shops? Could shopping carts of the future warn us when the products we've chosen exceed our recommended or personally desired targets for salt/sugar/carbs? Or will consumers simply embrace the budgeting and convenience elements of such a device while maintaining much greater control over their product choices? Is this, in fact, an over-complication of an otherwise simple task? We'd love to hear your views.

On Thursday, the Future Foundation and partner The Liminal Space took a small group of clients on our first consumer safari, a curated foray into the experiential side of insight gathering.  To stimulate new ways of thinking, we touched on three very different trend narratives – emotive consumption, ethical consumerism and contemporary connoisseurship.

First stop – the  Victoria Miró contemporary art gallery in Islington, currently exhibiting works by Grayson Perry and Sarah Sze.  Elke Seebauer, our guide and senior sales representative, explored some of the guiding principles behind working with ultra-high-net-worth individuals.  What came through was that for many sectors, the consumption journey can be a deeply emotive and personal experience.  Art collectors are passionate consumers, trading loyalty for exclusivity, trust for authenticity.

The artwork also reinforced the fact that as communicators, we sometimes need to look at things in totally different ways.  Grayson Perry’s tapestries for example, detailed his own consumer safari as he travelled among the taste tribes of Britain, literally weaving the characters he met into a fabric narrative.

Next stop was FARM:, an ethical and environmental outpost in the unlikely urban landscape of Dalston, Hackney.  Co-founder Paul Smyth took us on a journey, starting with a derelict East End shop that was renovated with the help of the local community, via a prototype closed loop agriculture system that harvests fish manure to cultivate soft leaf crops and ending with a vision to bring farming to the urban environment.  FARM: taught the group about innovation, passion for an inspirational mission and grassroots campaigning.  Not to mention how to grow mushrooms out of cappuccino waste!

The final stop of the day was Borough Market, where we met food artist/ fanatic, Caroline Hobkinson.  We’d been promised a futuristic feast from 2062 – ice cream, Stichelton cheese, salmon injected with peaty whisky, locally produced brownies and mint-wrapped edamame beans featured highly. Caroline’s retrofuturistic method of projecting us into 2062 to look back on 2012’s attitudes to food chimes with our own innovation methods, drawing inspiration by looking backwards from the future.

Thanks to The Liminal Space for providing such an entertaining, inspiring and educational experience.  If you are interested in future consumer safaris, let us know!

In March, Domino’s Pizza joined the growing list of brands using price gamification tactics in order to drive consumer interest  -  holding what it called a  “Tweet Treat” initiative at its Lincoln branch which saw the price of its pepperoni pizza falling as more and more people “Tweeted” about it on social networks.

Running between 9am and 11am on March 5th, the offer was, so the brand said, an attempt to reward customers and increase lunchtime orders - with Twitter and Facebook members being invited to use a “#LetsDoLunch” hashtag in order to influence the final price. Those who chose to participate were then able to purchase the pizza through the Domino’s website once the "reverse auction" had closed.

At the start of April, Domino's ran a similar initiative at its Milton Keynes branch, with prices for five large pizzas falling by at least a penny each time a relevant hashtag was posted (to a minimum of £6.50 per pizza - with the final price in this instance being £6.98). And it says it has plans take the Tweet Treat proposition to other outlets across the country in the coming weeks.

From Uniqlo to Innocent, Gap to Swedish supermarket ICA Vanadis, examples of retailers adopting a more playful approach to RRP are very quickly multiplying in number. Can we thus imagine a not-too-distant future where real-time sales monitoring and continuously adjusted price display support increasingly personalised deals? Will playful and game-like interactions be used more frequently to engage, entertain and create closer bonds with consumers in conventional retail spaces as well as online and on mobile platforms? We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Earlier this month, LG unveiled its ThinQ refrigerator – a so-called “smart” fridge retailing at around £2000 which the company claims can act as a dietician.

Users simply enter their BMI, diet preferences and desired level of weight loss (the latter being optional), with the ThinQ then able assess the impact that various foods inside it might have and suggest options which will best match an individual’s personal targets (using voice recognition technology to distinguish various members of the household).

In addition, the ThinQ can alert owners when products are about to reach their expiry dates – displaying information on its in-built screen – and also allows users to see the contents of the fridge via their mobiles (thus removing the need for shopping lists).

Such a product chimes with a number of the trends we track here at nVision - touching everything from the Networked Society and Healthy Hedonism to The Quantified Self and the End of Inefficiency – and gives a glimpse of how much smarter are homes will become as the current decade evolves.