1. 2011 will be a fairly dull year. Things will continue to go poorly in places where things are already doing poorly, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and the drug war cities of Juarez and Tijuana in Mexico. It could hit the fan in North Korea, but I doubt it.
-Boy was I wrong. The revolutions and regime changes in the Middle East were the defining events. Korea had a lateral regime change and I predict that things will continue as they are there for several more decades.And then there was Occupy Wall Street.
2. American politics will have more than usual sound and fury and idiots. It's the deep breath before the plunge into the 2012 election year. Obama may do something surprising, but I doubt it.
-A safe prediction and it is still being played out. Obama may take a progressive turn after his speech in Kansas (in conjunction with the Occupy movements), but we'll see.
3. Revolutions in architecture will be subdued because there isn't enough money to do crazy stuff. The construction boom in China will slow down, maybe they'll have a real estate collapse, but strong government action will mitigate its effects. U.S. architecture firms will continue to experience consolidation and contraction. Tough luck for me, but so it goes.
-Meh on this one.
4. The upcoming changes in building codes, specifically as they relate to energy use, will start to take effect, but the impact will be marginal. The long term positive impact will have profound consequences, but excitement over "green" design will be more constrained.
-Too soon to tell.
5. The end of the middle will accelerate. I will give some banal examples of what I mean by this: Retail opportunities will be dominated by either discount goods or extreme luxury items--a few Hummers counterbalanced by lots of subcompact sedans. People will be either very rich or lower class. Aspirational impulses will be constrained by the long odds of achieving superstar success. But, life at the bottom will be distinguished more by grumbling than full-out misery. Perhaps on this note I am being too optimistic.
-Business people and economists call this the "hourglass" effect and it is the dominant trend in business planning.
6. Conservative design trends will dominate. Curvy stuff, which used to look so revolutionary, will be continue to dominate mass-produced products, but we might start to see more right angles and subtle details in architecture. The stuff in the magazines will still be curvy, expensive blobs, but ordinary stuff will be boxier and more restrained.
-Meh on this one. Mostly wrong. Not much has changed.
7. None of these predictions will be borne out perfectly--they aren't very aggressive or original in the first place, but so what.
8.Something entirely unexpected will happen.
7 & 8 were the usual disclaimers. Despite the political revolutions, the natural disasters and the continuing recession, 2011 was forgettable.
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