Perspectives-Lab’s 10 optimistic predictions for 2013
On this day, December 21, 2012, Perspectives-Lab is proposing 10 optimistic predictions to better envisage the future. We wish you a very happy holiday. Enjoy your reading.
1 – Conscientious Mankind: A new responsibility or a social organization? After theparoxysm of individualism, a leap of belonging to a broad human community is emergingfor some people. Does this new awareness of taking part in a group entity prefigure anew form of generosity and solidarity connected to our consumption? To prolong gifts,would the new winning equation in 2013 be “one consumer item bought, one consumeritem given to someone who needs it” like the eyeglass manufacturerJimmy Fairly’s advertising claim: “Buy one, give one.”
2 – New Aesthetic Prisms: Imagining, recomposing, giving texture to space. Artists,designers and architects are looking for new territories to model, new perspectivesto design and new vanishing points to explore, playing with geometric aesthetics thatcan be modulated and hybridized in circles, squares, triangles, rectangles, in 2D, 3D,4D… As shown by Issey Miyake’s Bao Bao bags and perfume bottles as well as LauraFernandez’s Modular Bowl creations or Kit Webster’s Prismatica work. An entanglementof lines and geometric figures to penetrate the mysteries of tomorrow. In 2013, use your3D printers to give relief and substance to your ideas.
3 – New Healthy Way of Life: Inhabiting a healthy, energetic and “sustainable” body.After having shaped an efficient and high-performance body for years, individuals seemto be looking for a healthy, energy-filled and “sustainable” body. The body will becomemore and more like a full-fledged ecosystem, a place of circulation, an energy resource,a vector of pleasure and beauty implying a life-style featuring common sense practicesand treatments. To follow in 2013, the proposals of the Whole Foods Wellness Club, thefundamental research of the Chronobiology Department at the University of Groningenin Holland and coaching in the new global beauty centers.
4 – Breath of Freedom: Arranging freer and more personal life-styles. During the lastfour years of a paralyzing crisis and in a worsening unemployment context, severalpeople have initiated new business activities that are more in sync with their desires andbetter adapted to their life-styles (restoring a house, managing children, preparing for amarathon, writing a book…). Whether they work for themselves, create new convivialityvenues (e.g., budding restaurant owner) or are entrepreneurs following new dreams(e.g., Kings County Distillery founded by David Haskel in the heart of Brooklyn), each of
them will try in 2013 to attain fulfillment by making use of his or her values and talents.They will dream of leading their life the way they really want to following the example ofChristophe Le Vasseur, elected best baker in Paris in 2008, who has allowed himself toclose his bakery on the weekends.
5 – Mobi-Twitted: Opening new space-time frontiers. Mobilities at the heart ofcontemporary societies’ issues bring the individual into a new paradigm of flexibility,circulation and potential in a constantly changing socio-cultural environment. Fromvirtual mobility to real mobility and vice-versa, the multiplication of personalized,socialized and geolocalized data is reinventing individuals’ life-styles and how they thinkand consume. In 2013, do you envisage ordering your next running shoes on the virtualand interactive walls of Adidas stores, “adiVerse Virtual Footwear Wall”?
6 – “As green as possible”: More and more signs of a positive ego-conscience. Ratherthan staying inactive faced with the scope of the task to curb the deterioration of theplanet, which sometimes requires radical changes in consumption and a completerevision of business models, consumers and brands, within their capabilities, aremodifying their behaviors “as best they can” and “as sustainable as possible” as theclothing brand RVR Lardini puts on its labels. In 2013, the idea will be to adopt a positiveand sincere vision of the gestures to make rather than sticking with an ideologicaldogmatism often considered unobtainable and especially during a crisis period.
7 – Opening up to the strange: Diving into the unknown to find something new. If thecrisis initially triggered falling back on what is known and reassuring, we will pushopen the doors of the unknown in 2013 to find new things and also experiments withdestabilizing moments. Disconcerting gustatory discoveries like tasting lichens at theNoma restaurant in Copenhagen, and escapes into the fantasy worlds of iconoclasticartists and creators such as the alternative universe of Vava Dudu or that of thecoiffeur Charlie Le Mindu’s hair styles, each individual will go off to encounter a strangeexperience, felt as an electric shock to better reinvent himself. To follow in 2013: theSpanish chef Ferran Adria’s “bulipedia”.
8 – Connectinomy: Managing, controlling and taming multiple connections and links.Would this be the end of the excessiveness of reactivity? Too many connections mightpush us to experiment with new isolated, barricaded vacation spots, safe from anyconnection, at very expensive prices… plunging to the bottom of black holes to catch ourbreath again for example at the Black Hole Resort in Big Sur, California. Will individualsbetter master their all-encompassing relationship with their cell phone and restore theborders between the private and the public? Fortunately because in the near future we’ll
open the doors of our homes with our iPhone thanks to the Lockitron solution. Will youtest the Freedom app in 2013 to help you disconnect through the possibility of blockingyour Internet access for a maximum of eight hours?
9 – Liberation of the psyche: Trusting your internal compass. It has been a long timesince the divide between the head and the body. After centuries of the dominationof thought over the body, for the last several years we’ve been experiencingan enhancement of the active body in motion. Couldn’t we see in this today anemancipation of the psyche to embrace more harmonious cultural practices and styles?Hasn’t the era of psychoanalysis been enriched by the knowledge and practices ofenergy specialists, hypnosis therapists and shiatsu masters to find a personal fluidityonce again? In the absence of reassuring political structures, the individual is openingup to new explorations and mindsets to continue his path as he conceives it.
10 – The hyper-life: Feeling and experimenting with the living. Over-solicited byever more extraordinary experiences, and by a world saturated with increasinglysophisticated consumer goods, some people have a vital need for reconnectingthemselves with the living and the true, experienced in a raw and obvious way, strippedof any artifice. Being reconnected with yourself and with the real has become animperative. We savor vegetables from the kitchen garden and poultry bought from anetwork of small local producers, we go to the facialist, aka the facial gymnast, wetake agricultural tourism vacations… 2013 will mark the entrance into the era of thecelebration of what isn’t for sale to offer us a vibrant experience.