Slow Design →
The Six Principles of Slow Design (via Changing the Change, see full document here):
Principle 1: Slow design reveals experiences in everyday life that are often missed or forgotten, including the materials and processes that can be easily overlooked in an artifact’s existence or creation.
Principle 2: Slow design considers the real and potential “expressions” of artifacts and environments beyond their perceived functionalities, physical attributes and lifespans.
Principle 3: Slow Design artifacts/environments/experiences induce contemplation and what slowLab has coined ‘reflective consumption.’
Principle 4: Slow Design processes are open-source and collaborative, relying on sharing, co-operation and transparency of information so that designs may continue to evolve into the future.
Principle 5: Slow Design encourages users to become active participants in the design process, embracing ideas of conviviality and exchange to foster social accountability and enhance communities.
Principle 6: Slow Design recognizes that richer experiences can emerge from the dynamic maturation of artifacts, environments and systems over time. Looking beyond the needs and circumstances of the present day, slow designs are (behavioural) change agents.
These Slow Design Principles present a set of criteria against which the designer is invited to interrogate and appraise her/his ideas, processes, motives, and outcomes.
This should begin at the initial phase of any design project, with the designer returning to these criteria several times during the design process, and applying them again to evaluate the final design outcome and better understand its potential future impacts.
This process of careful and continuous (self-)questioning challenges the designer to reach for the core VALUES of design and her/his role as a designer.
Philosophy and principles of slow design (via Slow Design; see also Slow Theory):
- Design to slow human, economic and resource use metabolisms.
- Repositioning the focus of design on individual, socio-cultural and environmental well-being.
- Design to celebrate slowness, diversity and pluralism.
- Design encouraging a long view.
- Design dealing with the ‘continuous present’ (a term coined in the 1950s by Bruce Goff, the American architect who noted that history is past and the future hasn’t arrived but that the ‘continuous present’ is always with us).
- ‘Design as a counterbalance to the ‘fastness’ (speed) of the current (industrial and consumer) design paradigm’.
Articles on slow design:
