If ‘All men are designers’ where ‘design is the conscious effort to impose meaningful order’ (Papanek, 1972) and ‘Design is making sense of things’ (Krippendorff, 1995), then how does design respond to the contemporary challenges of the eco-economy (Brown, 2001), environmentalism and socialism, and how does it balance the local with the global? Some urgent questions face designers. By 2050, when 10 to 20 billion people will inhabit the planet, will design be contributing to a headlong rush towards human and planetary tragedy or will design have found a new paradigm to contibute towards more sustainable ways of living, working and playing? How can we summon design to deal with the shock of globalisation and its consequent environmental and socio-cultural degradation?  Can design create new perceptions, and values, of time.  Can design de-accelerate economic and human metabolism? 

New cultural conversations about the value of ‘slowness’ are emerging.  “Slow” is perceived as an antidote to “Fast”, the latter being our default everyday world.  Recent uses of the adjective slow, such as the Italian ‘Slow Food’ and ‘Slow Cities’, have tapped into a viewpoint that people recognise. The idea of ‘slow activism’ is gaining ground (New Internationalist, 2002).  Slowing people and flows of energy, materials, and/or information is central to concepts of improvements in well-being by designing products and services for a regenerative economy and creating ‘islands of slowness’(Manzini, 2001).  Such ‘ islands of slowness’ hint at ‘a sea of fastness’.  Speed is a concept resulting in a continuum of individual and socio-cultural perceptions.  Without the fast we can’t appreciate the slow, and visa versa.  Recognition of this continuum is important for any paradigm offering itself as an antidote to the current design paradigm.