Re-valorisaton of time requires physical manifestations of slow design that catalyse new sensorial aesthetics. Manzini (1996) set a challenge to delegates at the Doors of Perception 4: Speed conference, ‘to create a new aesthetic in relation to slowness and speed we have to make another step inside the idea of speed.  And we have for the future movement what we call the sensorial speed.  But the sensorial speed is something related to risk control, related to a sort of aesthetic perception, that we can create without any reference to the real physical speed.’  Design has too long been dominated by the visual senses by manipulation of the marketplace and by fashion or style. Touch, smell, taste and sound have atrophied in the outpourings of the design profession.  Manifestations of slow design touch the senses deeply, foster a revival of intuition over information and de-commodify time.  Such manifestations rigourously test the abilities of the designer beyond the comfortable briefs of the consumer product.

Ritual, as practised in the old faiths, has largely been abandoned in favour of the ritual pleasures of consumerism.  Shopping is the new religion, the shopping centres and malls the cathedrals to which the populace flock.  Consumerism has usurped thousands of years of symbolic ritualism of natures’s seasons, religion, monarchy and patriarchy.  If design is to square up to contemporary issues then it must ask questions about the role of design in creating new, regenerative, rituals.  Cline (1997) suggests that ecological ritual is really about exploring the pleasure of mundane circumstances.  The objective of ecological ritual is to prolong time, to slow down the greedy (consumers), to turn away from symbolic ritual towards “pleasure-over-time” rituals.  Cline asks, ‘What rituals of delay could nourish us?  Or have the “virtual realities” of film and television made ever “real time” tedious, and therefore slowed up time unbearable?’  Cline quotes the American news commentator Roger Rosenblatt who asks ‘How do we regain a world that is directly lived?’ and the architectural critic Michael Benedikt who believes that ‘the direct esthetic experience of the real’, as given by architecture, offers a profound sense of reality.

In-built, ready-made experiences are a default condition of most design outcomes, but the strategic goals of fast industrial design paradigm is to tie experience to narrowly defined, commercially viable designs.  Resurgence of interest in experiential design shows a longing for design to break free of commercial shackles.