'Design principles' or 'Victims of fashion'?

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-04/uocp-wsi041106.php

"White space, or any other visual form, does not have some inherent meaning; it means what it does because of a particular history," explain the authors in a paper in the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. "This is a very important distinction in our approach. Most existing research into visuals asserts that a certain thing means this or that because of some inherent feature, and that we can count on it always meaning that. Our research refutes that."

This is interesting and suggests that design conventions are perhaps not principles as such but rather fads. Could we say victims of fashion?

Original paper that this alert refers to is here

Through our tracing of history, and by showing that creators and readers share an understanding about the meaning of white space, we hope to show that white space in particular, and visual communications more generally relies upon people coming to an agreement about what a particular visual means.