The next big thing is “Open Innovation” and “Co-working Space.”

Open innovation involves every part of society—academics, locals, students—sharing ideas and creating a prototype for a response plan in case of future disasters.

Flow Working Space is an ideal place open to anyone who wants to have a fully-functional work space, like a real office space: desks, hi-speed internet, fax, meeting room or kitchen.

There are so many groups out there who have great ideas but they don’t have a proper space where they can develop it.

We already have this place. It’s called “The Sync.” It’s a shared work space that anyone can use with rent that start from as low as B450 per month.

This trend is really becoming big everywhere, from Europe to Australia.

We’re really tired of big organizations that have top-down styles of management. It makes them move slowly, as we saw during the floods.

Better to focus on creating working groups, what we call “crowd sourcing” to work on a certain missions like volunteering.

Ploy Chavaporn Laohapongchana

She parties with celebrities, works as a personal shopper for Topshop Thailand, started her own handmade headband label under P’s Material, and is now a leading fashion blogger. Ploy, 28, first gained popularity by wearing headbands decorated with life-sized birds which soon became a huge hit. Since then, she’s has been a prominent trend setter. Combining her experience as a personal shopper and her keen eye (she always carries a camera), she’s developed a very personal style, using a lot of mix-and-match, whimsical accessories and a devil-may-care attitude. The result: 31,000 twitter followers and 21,000 on Facebook. poboxstyle.blogspot.com

Chalisa Viravan

A personal shopper for Siam Paragon and The Emporium, head designer of her brand Muung Doo, blogger (“Taste of Nowhere”), and stylist for Elle Thailand, Chalisa Viravan is another red hot fashion multi-tasker. She’s also retailing a specially curated collection of her favorite fashion finds, The Taste Market, making her more than just a taste-maker, but also an e-shopping powerhouse. www.tasteofnowhere.com

Panya “Ou” Jitrmanasakd’s

A fashion design graduate from the Istituto Marangoni, in London, Ou started out as a fashion blogger on Ploy Chavaporn’s site. Originally intended as a kind of portfolio, Ou’s Me-Panya blog soon got him plenty of work as a fashion blogger, fashion writer for Symbol of Style and designer and founder of clothing label Apostrophe-P. Ou’s blog will take you to fashion shows, collection previews as well as show you his favorite looks—and trust us when we say it’s his looks that keep his followers coming back for more. mepanya.blogspot.com

This year, cable TV will get more bold and wild. The government isn’t so strict about cable than it is about our regular channels. Producers are really having fun creating programs and making stuff you could have never seen before.

Cable TV’s audience has grown rapidly in the past couple of years so sponsors are noticing the hype and putting their brands on cable more and more.

What’s tired? Talk shows about celebrity gossip. I think they’re overrated. They make big stories out of nothing. A single Facebook picture and you’ve got a big deal. But I think people know there’s nothing important being reported on.

People now want shows with a fun and clear message. Production values don’t need to be extravagant and high-end. Just make it simple and easy, and get your message across with style.

We are planning a single-malt paired dinner in June with Glenmorangie single-malt scotches from Diageo Moet Hennessy. This will be really exciting as it has not been done often in Asia and the combination of a fine single-malt and matched food can be mind-expandingly delicious.

The other concepts in the early planning stages are a vegetarian night—with all or at least 80% vegetarian dishes. We hope this can show how great vegetarian food can be.

I hope there is a move towards restaurants that are more sincere in how they create meals and consider the customer. All restaurateurs need to make a profit, but being more personal and genuine, from sourcing food, to having a passion about the cuisine, is a good investment and not a wasted effort.

I’m fed up with restaurants in shopping malls and ramen restaurants—there must be almost as many in Bangkok as Tokyo.

A few higher end hotels are doing [pop-up restaurant nights] but it is not at all the same. They have huge support staff and professional kitchens and tend to do food that is already in the restaurant scene. We prepare everything in an Electrolux-sponsored home kitchen, so it is like a house dinner party. And we try to offer an experience and cuisines you cannot get anywhere else.

No matter which team I play for, the biggest goal for all footballers is trying to win a trophy. But this year is different as I moved to a bigger team [Muangthong United]. They’ve lost the TPL for two years in a row to Buriram, so it will be hard work.

Everyone in the team is a great footballer: they also play for the national team, well, all except me. I want to play for the national team if given a chance. If I get to play enough, I think I can do it.

The TPL marketing team has really boosted the buzz around the league, so I think we’ll have more fans attending each match. Every team really has its own fans now, that’s obviously very different compared to before. Now, they really come to see us, wear the team jersey and sing the team’s song. Every team has the same potential but I think support from our fans can really improve the performance of a team.

I play as a left winger and playmaker, it’s normal to get taken out by defenders but sometimes it’s obvious that it’s intentional. This needs to change.

We blame our fans when they fight as a hooligans but actually we also cheat in the game. I think this creates a bad image for Thai football.

Recently, I’ve been researching about water and its effect on our city. We came up with a project that helps provide new ideas on how we can live with water and protect ourselves from floods. It will be featured at the Architect 55 event at Challenger Hall on April 23-29.

Design-wise, we’ve been doing interior designs for Bangkok University: we designed something fun for the students like their club space and also a place for cheerleaders to practice.

The trend this year is for things to be more specific about addressing people’s needs—designers will have to dig deeper. Also, there are more niches, that require more personalized design. For example, people don’t just like bikes anymore, they like fixed gear bikes.

What I’m fed up with, apart from politics, is everything that’s a trend and formulaic, people who all go the same way and have no individuality, and don’t invent new things. We [Thais] only go for that one thing that everybody else is doing (or using) and we don’t use our creativity to create new ideas.

I’m eyeing two up-coming competitions; the Asia Championship and the Olympics. But actually, I’m more focused on the Olympics: it’s my dream.

I was inspired to go to the Olympics by Wijarn Polrit who won a gold medal at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. The Thai team got silver last time. This time we want gold.

We’ve been studying our closest competitors, Spain and Korea, and I think we have a chance.”

The problem with taekwondo is that people do it as children then stop. And it’s a costly sport, not like boxing or football. Competitions are also a problem as players complete only at a national level, not internationally.”