As many designers would acknowledge, the majority of their work is confined within the perspective and limitations set by commercial imperatives and confidentiality.  While any designer would accept a brief with defined limits, much commercial work is ‘self-editing’ and has reduced opportunities for collaboration in open source knowledge frameworks.  A key premise of slow design is that if it manages to deliver outcomes that meet real needs, then an economic or business model will readily follow.  Common knowledge, as opposed to proprietary or ‘owned’ knowledge, is a powerful tool for exploring new paradigms.  New networks of open source knowledge have flourished on the internet.  These offer a ready vehicle for exploring manifestations of slow design.

8 x 4 by tempo – Members of tempo, a network of sustainable designers linked through the internet, runs several projects focused on the concept of ‘design democracy’, the publication of copyright free designs for use by private individuals to provide low cost, easy-to-make, low environmental impact artefacts.  ‘8 x 4’ is a resource which provides cutting plans for domestic furniture and objects using standards 8 x 4 feet sheets (plywood, formaldehyde free MDF, blockboard and so on) with minimal offcuts or wastage.  Cutting and construction techniques are designed to utilise a typical household DIY toolkit.  The ‘8 x 4’ shelving is constructed with push fit joints, takes about five minutes to assemble, packs flat for moving and supports about 100 kilograms of books.  The ‘8 x 4’ resource is continually growing as members add new designs.

ENDCOMMERCIAL®, New York, USA by Scheppe Bohm Associates – A remarkable photographic archive of 60,000 pictures from 1997 to the present day records the richness and banality of everyday design in New York city.  The kind of design that rarely makes the magazines save as backgrounds for hip fashion shoots.  An unfolding ‘daily digital slum’ by photographers Florian Böhm, Luca Pizzaroni and Wolfgang Scheppe transfixes the viewer with urban scars and triumphs etched into pavements, sprayed on walls, encoded into broken bicycles, written on signs, revealed in people and places.  This reseach project examines design beyond the bright commercials, it digs deep into the urban-human interface, and reveals the unfamiliar in the everyday.  Here the rhythmn of design is unhurried, the urgency of the commercial imperative abandoned in favour of a broader cultural swell.

©2004, 2005 Alastair Fuad-Luke. All rights reserved.