Slow Design and the Lost Art of Shifting Gears

This paper is a contribution to the growing discourse around the transformations taking place at the intersections of design, ecology and culture. It is about slow design and the lost art of shifting gears. It embraces ‘Festina lente’ from the Latin, which means ‘make haste slowly’. The phrase and its implied meaning is central to a new interpretation of slow design, espousing the philosophies of ‘slow’ and a method that puts them into practice. Slow design does not imply idleness, but rather taking the necessary time to consider and visualize unintended consequences and actively seeking out ways to not only avoid these but to find better alternatives. Long term thinking (ex. Seven Generation Theory) and the notion of sustainments frame and orient the overall intention while new social processes transpire. This thesis describes in detail a new design methodology that is possible if designers focus first on one conceptual variable – time. The focus on time enables designers to recognize variations in physical and temporal scales (i.e. context), expanding one’s temporal horizon and building capacity to respond quickly to changing conditions. This is the true challenge for the designer working towards socio-cultural and ecological regeneration. Questions that will be answered in the paper are as follows: What is slow design? How does it differ from conventional design? What are the criteria? What are the precedents? What is the methodology and how is it applied? Conceived as a floating structure, built mostly of salvaged materials, the project component of my thesis (RAFT) is used as a way to test and work through the creative possibilities that surround slow design. I use RAFT as a research tool – a conceptual and physical sounding board to uncover and develop a template for practicing slow design. The method was conceived primarily for industrial designers, and therefore more often than not includes a physical product output. It has the ability to transfer to other forms of sustainable design and production.