Designers will point out all sorts of usability studies. The reality is that the art world, of which industrial design is an integral part, lives and dies arou

Designers will point out all sorts of usability studies. The reality is that the art world, of which industrial design is an integral part, lives and dies around fads or "movements", which negate each other every few years. We're currently at tail end of a wave that preached flatness, leveraging the move from low-res to high-res screens to entrench itself as easier to implement. Now that the migration is near completion, a correction is bound to happen. Apple have already started: they attempted to reintroduce depth and shadows in their recent iterations of icons, arguably with mixed results. More and more people will try, eventually resulting in a new wave against flatness.