> the trends can be rationalized from anthropological, sociological, or psychological perspectives
I'm not an inherent skeptic of the worth of the soft humanities, but it's pretty far fetched to claim that these fields can offer anything like a unified or even non-contentious view on design elements, or anything else for that matter. If anything, the virtue of these fields is based on the multiplicity of interpretation they offer. They ain't Newtonian physics, that's for sure.
I'm not an inherent skeptic of the worth of the soft humanities, but it's pretty far fetched to claim that these fields can offer anything like a unified or even non-contentious view on design elements, or anything else for that matter. If anything, the virtue of these fields is based on the multiplicity of interpretation they offer. They ain't Newtonian physics, that's for sure.