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Community, mindfulness and warmth: a hopeful start to the New Year

Every year, in late December, as the solstices approach — winter or summer, depending on your  hemisphere — the design-trends-for-the-next-year articles appear, as if to beat the new year deadline. This false urgency exaggerates their significance: these aren’t catastrophic, black-swan events (wholly unpredictable — until they happen!) but slow processes already in motion. These “trends” are tendentious and exist only in the eye of the observer. They are a form of navel gazing, a year-end meditation when we pause to be communitarian, and give thanks. And to indulge our need to see our biases confirmed (I told you so).

With those