“Yoga”: About 1,860,000,000 results in 0.59 seconds.

An interesting fact, thinking that until the 70s in Europe there were only a few hundred people who practiced Yoga and four of these were the Beatles. Western Yoga, in addition to being an indisputable cure-all for the body and mind, is still a very fertile ground for new business.

The Yoga Festival, now a crucial annual event for all the great metropolises from New York to Budapest, is enriched with new “tools for yoga” which are increasingly sophisticated and more and more similar to design objects. Brands are multiplying and product ideas proliferate: from yoga mat with personalized artist-graphics, to eco-chic bags designed in Bali, from leggings that cost as an evening gown, to various eco-friendly  props that should assist the success of the postures.

Definitely a very rapid aesthetic revolution, if we think that, until 15 years ago, yoga only came to Italy through black and white photographs of Indian masters who carried out their practice in their underwear.

Start-Up at world’s end

Soon the photos of the Northern Lights will replace Capri and Greek beaches even in the family albums. More and more people are looking for extreme adventure and go to the world’s ends just for a vacation (and a couple of Instagram posts). This creates new opportunities for start-ups specializing in “Escape Experience”.

The Secret Compass, for instance, is both a travel agency and a production company specializing in projects at the world’s end. Jungles, deserts and remote polar regions.

The common thread is “high-risk & extreme projects”. Just as the explorers of the past, only with a smartphone instead of a rifle. But are we sure we can be at the same time office creatures and Bengal tigers? And will we continue to experience the same attraction for “the dark side of the Earth” once it will be on everyone’s Instagram profile, or will we have already moved on to the next trend?

Back to Nature

Close your eyes and imagine New York, Paris and Milan becoming the perfect habitat for tigers, elephants and parrots.

Of course, it takes a little imagination. The one that surely accompanied the project by the French photographer Chris Morin-Eitner called ‘Once Upon a Time Tomorrow’. Bears diving into the pool, penguins walking around the squares, wild boars stopped at the traffic lights.

Here’s how our cities could become if nature and animals really took their space back, just as we started seeing during this lockdown period. What the artist imagined with a certain prophetic intuition – his photographic work began in 2012 – is “a sort of rediscovered garden of Eden, full of colours, shapes and poetry, where the hierarchy of straight corners and large empty spaces is replaced by the exuberance of nature, which grows in the most unexpected directions.”

An artistic work but also a visionary dream, more or less rational, but certainly very, very green.

Motion Graphics, typography and archival images.

People can no longer go around in the real world, neither on foot nor with the steady-cam. Film directors are on the couch watching Netflix, and productions are all postponed until a later date.

Yet visual communication is not giving up. It simply reinvents itself, or rather, exploits and maximizes all those alternative resources and methods that know how to move independently of real life. “Space Selfie” by Samsung, “Find Your Connection” by Google and The Guardian’s “Margaret” were entirely created from a home desk, with no live footage.

And these are but a few examples of how animations, illustrations, CGI, VFX, motion graphics, compositing, archival images and video clips generated by users represent a new way of making communication, filled with research and talent, that changes the aesthetic coordinates of our visual spectrum without giving up neither creativity nor quality.

Let’s start with the numbers. The Garden Media Trends Report tells us that five million (out of six) new gardeners are between 18 and 34 years old.

It seems clear that Gen Y, perhaps more than any other generation, is embracing a new concept of gardening, with apartment plants and flowers becoming one of the favourite hobbies of the new urban generations.
If gardening was previously considered an activity for retirees, today having a beautiful collection of plants is a fundamental requirement for being smart.

Surrounding yourself with greenery, also and above all living in the city, seems to represent for the new generations an easy and economical way to help psychophysical well-being and reduce daily anxiety. An opportunity to be seized, also for new brands and historical companies that want to reconfigure 2.0 gardening.

Even the so-called “colour meteorologists” from Pantone Color Institute define the next decade “The Greenery Age”. After all, we hope so, because, as we all know, green is the colour of hope.

Phase 3 has no boundaries.

Space, future and perseverance are the three keywords of all dreamers. Especially those who have very, very distant horizons such as astronauts and aerospace researchers.

“You need to know how to dream impossible things but also to wake up in order to do them” recalls astronaut Nespoli who, after spending over 300 days in space, landed at Bari’s Wired Digital Day 2020 to talk about spatial perspectives.

The space economy is an area with infinite possibilities that also Italy, thanks to a long tradition in aeronautics and aerospace, should look at. From the upstream phase – which involves the creation of space infrastructures, satellites or actual bases located on the Moon or on rocky planets of the solar system -, to the downstream phase – which reuses the data collected in space on Earth, with the ultimate goal of transforming and using on our planet also physical resources, such as precious metals, collected directly from space

A new hunt for gold beyond the earth’s borders? Yes, but this time mankind will need to prove to the whole solar system that it has acquired new levels of awareness and sustainability.

You’re not special. You are not a unique and beautiful snowflake. You are organic matter, decomposing as anyone else.” this was part of Tyler Durden’s training in the Fight Club. Seventeen years after the film was released the term “snowflake” is defined by the Guardian as the Insult of the Year, used to describe the emotional lack of self-confidence of new generations.

But Lies Notebaert from Western Australia’s School of Psychological Science claims: “New generations don’t lack self-confidence, they are simply less equipped to deal with negative emotions”. Resilience is an answer to a sort of anxiety. Our world got better under many points of view, but there are new forms of adversity, as social media violence or cyberbullying, that leave us emotionally unprepared.

In the current university system, what is at stake is high, and the fear for failure is crucial. Professor Notebaert concludes “I’d like to start a challenge in which all my students fail, to then give them a second chance to apply all that they learnt from failure.”

It’s great to suck at something

When did you last try something new? Wait, not just anything. It needs to be something you quite suck at, but which nevertheless brought you joy. Something that fueled your passion, not your ego. We live in an era of performance psychosis, with an obsessive pursuit of perfection.

We constantly complain about too much work but keep choosing productivity over happiness. Going back to being a beginner means feeling joy in the process, without being obsessed with the result.

The big challenge of starting over is to accept that you can fail. Once, ten, a hundred times. Because to be a “successful beginner” you need not only great courage but also some experience.