The Zen Innovator

— The Calm Technology

“The Digital Detox”, “1 Week Unplugged”, “Screen-Free Week”, there are hundreds of proposals to escape from technology. But what’s next? If you survive the abstinence and get home safely to your 3 smartphones waiting for you with their chats open, how can you not fall back? It is assumed that salvation may lay in design. According to Karim Rashid, one of the most innovative designers in the world, “There is no shape that is not designed to simplify the lives of people”. And so the extreme simplification of smartphones seems to be the only real solution in order to reduce the so-called “connectivity addiction”.

More and more essential, up to the “new” proposal from Google: the sheet of paper. Yes, that’s right. Paper Phone helps to switch off for a few hours, maybe for a whole day, from your smartphone. At the beginning of the day, you use the app to print the important information you might need (appointments, maps and contacts to call) and you will leave your smartphone at home or switched off in your bag, and you will only use the paper support . Socially acceptable? If it comes from Google most likely yes.

— The Yogic Business

“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 practised 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.

— A Generation with a Green Thumb Is Back

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. And 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.