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participants (this page): Michael Kieslinger, Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, fluidtime.com Jouke Kleerebezem, Jan van Eyck Academy, nqpaofu.com Bani Singh Debra Solomon, artist, the-living.org Carolyn F. Strauss, slowLab Indri Tulusan, Royal College of Art, wandervogel.co.uk
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> dialogue 09 December 2003 The following dialogue was part of a workshop on ‘slow design’ led by Carolyn Strauss in Bangalore, India on the occasion of Doors of Perception East. Doors East was a unique gathering of European and Indian designers, technologists and cultural experts to collaboratively examine issues of social quality and sustainability. For more information about Doors East, click here > ... JK: What I was wondering this morning, with all this talk about designing services, is whether design is a service itself. And it makes a different relationship in terms of a designer being serviceable. It’s a totally different relationship to the people you work and work for, rather than if you design the service and just deliver it, ship the service to them as a product. I see a designer as someone who is ‘in service’ to the people he works with, either where the commission is coming from or who it is going to. We can’t think in these hierarchical systems. I’m from graphic design, and I think a lot of this is about industrial design or services around industrial design. But I think as a designer to be in service of whoever you’re designing for is an interesting position to be in. DS: I was also wondering how you communicate this to your clients and if this would change the process you’re undergoing with them. CS: Well in terms of industrial design and the manufacturing processes often required, there are long term investments. If you want to move away from automation or even just make one minor change in manufacturing process, it’s not a short term investment. It’s takes process re-engineering and human re-engineering and education. But if you can look at the long term benefits… Here’s a great example: There’s a group in the states called McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry. They are the foremost proponents of ‘Cradle to Cradle’ design. Most products that are designed are ‘cradle to grave.’ Even if they are re-used and recycled (which is usually a process of ‘down-cycling’), eventually what’s made ends up in a grave. What MBDC is looking at are biological processes, eco-systems. Noting that humans are the only species of animal that takes more energy out of the earth than we put back into it (in fact, they mostly just take it out), they’re creating designed products and design services that enable people to adopt these processes whereby the end-product is a biological nutrient. They were asked by a fabric company called Designtex to create an upholstery fabric that would be 100% compostable and biodegradable. They worked with a Swiss textile mill to achieve this. They immediately discarded the possibility of working with something like 2000 materials that were environmentally toxic or non-renewable, and found several that they felt they could work with (e.g. natural fiber based). So they created this fabric that’s actually been fairly well received and indeed is compostable/biodegradable. But the most amazing thing about this story is that when the regulators came to test the effluent of the factory-- that is, what’s coming out of the factory-- they found that the water coming out of the factory was cleaner than the water that they knew was coming in from the municipal water system! And that also, as a result, the people working in the factory were suddenly working under much better conditions: they didn’t have to wear protective clothing because there were no more toxic chemicals in use, they weren’t storing chemicals in the factory so they could convert those storage rooms to better use, and lastly, the textile mill became extremely prosperous as a result of this. So the initial design problem was just about creating an upholstery fabric, and yet the whole process had many more wonderful effects than just the material outcome of the project. So I like this idea that you can get more out at the end than you put in at the beginning. That you can actually bring forth an essence of an object or an environment by infusing the process with more value. (link: DesignTex Environmentally Intelligent Fabrics >) … DS: Sometimes you see these Saturn ads that emphasize the company and the wellbeing of workers at these Saturn factories (or maybe it was a different company)… CS: Well, it would be interesting to see whether it’s true. I mean, as Lavrans was saying yesterday, so many companies say “This is who we are,” but that doesn’t mean that they are putting their actions where their mouths are. We talked about this during a dialogue in New York where one industrial designer pointed out something along the lines that the conditions of the people working at Saturn may be fine, but what about the conditions of the people who are actually making the parts before they get to Saturn’s factory? It’s like a company saying that it’s growing food organically, but they’re growing it in soil that was soaked in chemicals for 20 years prior. DS: Or you’re growing it organically in New Zealand and then flying it to Amsterdam in a big airplane JK: That’s the idea of ecological footprint which measures ALL the footprint. That measures all the balance of inputs and how much value is added. DS: Has anyone ever done that? I mean if you could be a company that kind of stickered products with traces… CS: Actually we talked about this in another dialogue. How you could write a query that was linked to a bar code so that when you scan the barcode, it triggers this information so you could actually find out a lot more about the product and the history of its making. And it could be policed by those people involved in the process, a kind of open environment, creating these kind of feedback loops so that you can see the whole story more clearly. JK: Would you involve the consumers in this aspect? DS: When I look at myself as a consumer, I would be happy to know how my stuff gets to market. I buy stuff at the market in Amsterdam and I try to buy seasonal vegetables, but I don’t ask if my broccoli came from Spain… MK: It’s really interesting, I don’t know if it’s a law, but I know that in Germany if you go to some restaurants they have footnotes on the menu telling you if there are added preservatives and those kind of things for each item on the menu. And you realize what kind of crap there is in this food. The choices you have are actually extremely limited. I think it shows how if we bring information to the consumers we can make choices. There are some people reading information and then going to the shop, but most people just don’t do that. CS: I think there are a lot of people, especially in the country I come from, who don’t care. JK: No, but even if I care, shopping is hard to do. You don’t want to go through the hassle all the time of knowing what you are buying. Or you know better but you buy it anyway. DS: Sometimes you want an avocado! I read all the ingredients of the package I hold in my hand, but I don’t ask, indeed, where the vegetable came from that I buy from the local guy. Though I know we don’t grow avocados in the Netherlands. MK: I think it’s about the general footprint. If you cycle all year and then take an airplane trip to go on holidays it’s fine. Rather than driving to work everyday by car and then cycling to holidays… JK: So every consumer should have an ecological checkup all the time, what he pollutes and adds to the environment… CS: There are actually web sites out there that if you put in what you’re consuming and how you’re getting yourself from place to place it can tell you what impact your life is making on the environment. Natalie Jeremijenko had a project a few years ago called Stump, and it was a little program that sat on your desktop and counted how many pages you were printing out and gradually gave you rings on a tree… and when you basically had consumed a whole tree it would award you with a stump. DS: Can you program it? Because I always use both sides of the paper ;-) ... BS: I’m just wondering whether slow design vs. the fast track is a function of age? Most people, after they’ve been through a sort of process, they come to a reflective point. CS: I’m finding that people who are getting attracted to this project of slow are various ages. It’s really about disconnecting from being disconnected, which is a condition that society imposes at all ages these days… BS: One thing I’ve experienced with this slow vs. fast is that you can sometimes feel the time frontier. Sometimes in India you are going from a city and you have a project in a village, and you go there and you are on this tight schedule, but that person is in no hurry. It’s more stressful, until you calm down. And it takes you a certain amount of time for you to get rewarded with the fact that slow works. Then you realize that you actually achieve more. But to start with you have to have the patience. So maybe you give it a chance… DS: Maybe there could be a design for this transformation period. There must be some way to put it into the protocol… because it’s true that one always has to remind oneself to do it. CS: Well, it’s a bit like what I said yesterday about Fluidtime (http://www.fluidtime.com) that you don’t want to design away all aberration of humans, all possibility of synchronicity… it doesn’t have to be so efficient all the time. In fact you can learn quite a bit from slowing down. BS: Another example: there were friends of mine who set up an NGO in a rural area (of India) and they felt to start with that they were having a lot of resistance from the people there. And they thought about it, wondering why it was so, and they realized that, in their minds, they’d given themselves ten years to achieve a certain amount and then maybe move on. While the people there were going to spend their life there, so they weren’t in a hurry, and they couldn’t understand why these guys were in a hurry. It just took that attitude shift—they decided, ‘Okay, we will also spend our life here.’ Whether they were actually going to spend their life there or not… JK: This is what I meant when I said ‘Design as a service.’ You just spend your life there. You just stay with the client! CS: Or you at least approach your process from, ‘This is where I’m living the rest of my life.’ BS: So it takes a certain kind of shift inside. And I’m just wondering whether in a fast city what happens. Like in India, take a place like Delhi. In a way Delhi is a bit like a museum. There are areas that are in the 21st century and then there are areas that are in the 13th century. There are bits that have changed, but there are bits that have not changed a bit. So there you are going into a place where you slow down. Sometimes you need to recuperate. And you don’t know why you are stressed out so you need to just go into that different time zone. So you know it would be very nice if you could say “Oh, you’re in happiness? I’m in chaos…” Nobody’s planned it, but it’s a chaos that’s allowed so it continues to exist. CS: When I was living in the Netherlands, there was something that I had my design group looking at which was the pacing of the city [Amsterdam]. I was designing this interactive tv system that was heavy on technology, so we were looking at the pacing of the technology and how, when you got a load of people on the system, it would slow down. You know, we always expect with these things, we want fast pace, we want pages to load right away, we want this immediate thing. I asked my team to look at physical models of navigation specific to the cultural context. So it was mapping things like walking around the city, riding on a tram, taking a taxi, and importantly what it’s like to be on a bicycle. An amazing thing about biking in a city like Amsterdam is that nobody is speeding around… people while they’re riding are talking on their phones and whistling and singing and taking in what’s around them. They can enjoy the weather and the sights and each other, and yet they’re still getting there in the most efficient way. It really creates this richer experience of just traveling from your home to your workplace or wherever you may be going. And that was something we incorporated into the design: Why does it have to move so fast? Even in those periods when there aren’t too many people stressing the system, why not still have it running at a certain slower pace and introduce interstitial content that could be enriching. We decided to get people used to moving at a different pace, so that the issue of how fast the technology could move wasn’t an issue anymore. So I hope you can see this relevance to what you were talking about, Bani. That if we begin to design in a way that’s comprehensive of all those different speeds of culture that may occur in a city, then we may have dramatically different and more holistic results. JK: When you talked about that Delhi was not designed, I just wonder what makes this a fact? What sustains this fact that in one part you are in the 13th century and in another part you are in the 21st century? BS: I think in Delhi’s case and a lot of times in India’s case it’s not planned. I even had an argument with someone about ‘Is chaos bad?’ I feel that its chaos that has allowed it and us to survive here. And I feel that in India we are losing things rapidly now because order’s coming in. So even if you look at heritage projects here, we’ve lost more in the last 30 years because of prosperity—because people want to break it down and do it again and ‘make it better.’ IT: It’s also just in different cultures. If you go to Brixton [in London] where all the Jamaican people are it’s much slower… MK: There’s an excellent book by a guy called Levine called ‘The Geography of Time.” He went around all over the world looking at cultures and there speed and spacing. He actually did tests on how fast cultures are. He used three things: One is to look at how fast people walk on the sidewalk. The second thing is to buy the smallest stamp with the highest bill you can have—go to the post office and see how long it takes you to get that stamp. And the third one was how far the clock is off the official time. It’s interesting to get a real scale from like Mexico, Brazil, obviously quite different from Switzerland, which ranks in first position. Italy is actually second. It’s a lot faster than the U.S. But then you also have the difference in the U.S. between New York and Minnesota. It’s a really interesting book. IT: It’s also interesting, since we’re talking about creating awareness, with the consumer and maybe in the industry, to see how you can use this kind of project to create awareness? MK: I’ve done two projects with students that were called ‘Fast Technologies for Slow Cities’ that came out of this philosophy… There was an interview with one of the mayors who founded the ‘slow cities’ movement, who also felt that fast technologies are needed to create communities and to connect them together. But on the same side I think there is some sort of conservatism in there, which I think is problematic… DS: And nationalist. MK: Exactly. So I think we have to be very careful about how we argue about this. And that we also have to be careful in that ‘slow’ is not directly leading to social harmony. If you look, for example, at unemployed people, their lives are extremely slow, and anything that would be fast would be much better. So I think it’s important to have ‘slow’ as an argument or counterpoint against the dominating high-speed, but we need to have what we could call the ‘options of time,’ where you have the option to go into town or go into a church, into spaces where you really slow down to connect to your rhythms when you need to. And you also need the chance to connect to high speeds, just because sometimes you need that to feel alive as well. CS: Absolutely. And that’s why I mention individual well-being before I mention harmony. Because while we have a certain vision about what ‘harmony’ is, it’s about people feeling well in who they are and what they do. But you make a very good point. MK: Just an example, if you look at the techno culture, where you dance to 160 beats per minute, but at the same time you go out and there is a ‘chill out room.’ They completely understand that you need both elements. DS: And they watch the Teletubbies. MK: I think they have really merged into a way of understanding both elements quite well. IT: But maybe that’s just taking things to extremes. You go to one total extreme so then you need the other extreme as well… MK: Of course it’s extremes but it just shows us that there’s some space in between as well. There’s the fast which can be good, but there’s the slow which is very important. And then you mentioned something about just diving into it. I remember this child who was learning to swim and the parents told him, “You don’t sink, just go for it.” BS: And you will achieve your goal. It’s hard to believe when you start that if you’re slow you will achieve your goal. CS: I also think that there’s an interstitial space between fast and slow which is what ‘slowness’ is about. I mean the chill out room is a counterpoint to the other, but slowness is revealed in between those things. DS: It’s the parantheses in a way. Interstitial time is the parantheses so that you can understand the context of slow. CS: And the other thing I wanted to mention about slow food is that whenever I mention it, if the other person is a member they immediately announce it: “I’m a member of slow food.” They are very proprietary about it. People feel they are a part of a movement. Or these slow cities. As a part of them you are asked and expected to check and regard your position. And I think among designers that can also be valuable. DS: Well, it’s about branding. Indeed, what you say about the slow food movement, it’s about these 'convivia,' which are local hubs that are definitely commercial. Or the slow cities—I don’t believe that neon is necessarily bad, though car alarms are okay ;-). I mean, New York is not a slow city, but it’s a great city, it’s fabulous. CS: There are moments in a city like New York that are very slow. Pockets of slowness. DS: You need this interstitial space to go slow, but you don’t need it to go back to the fast speed. Because you are slow already, so you’re lagging, but then you get in the rhythm and skip two beats and suddenly you’re there. It’s a completely different feeling from slowing down. JK: Not for me, it’s the same as speeding up. But I live in a very slow place since 5 years. 80% of my time is in a slow area, in a rural area and totally out of everything. And then I speed up to the Netherlands to work, and I speed up a bit, but I really need to speed up. My mind is not brain dead, but it has to get accustomed to a different reasoning… as soon as you’re in the pace then you adapt, but building up to it is almost the same as slowing down to the other. IT: When you go on holiday, the first thing you have to do is slow down. It takes a couple of days… ... CS: Indri, your project to me with the kiosk (Culture Cloud, detailed at www.wandervogel.co.uk) where you have the community participating and creating a richer, kind of vertical access of information that goes deeper into the community is also very slow. I mean, slow is also local and close-mesh networks of people and their activities. Actually, the project that I referred to earlier, the Highline redesign I did… The most important thing about the project was how the structure would actually be built. We began to look at how fast growing timber bamboo can be used as a structural material in architecture, as a framework and how the communities of use could actually make their own unique architectural plantings, and that as this thing is growing they could then mould the spaces based on their programmatic use and the desires of the community. And that they could be modified over time. So we were addressing community and form. The community gets to decide not only how the space gets used, but also what forms the spaces take on. And then the idea with the gardening was that in greenhouse like situations you could take the oxygen-rich air and pump it out into public spaces or to adjacent buildings to enhance their air quality… MK: In Tokyo there’s a new law that 20% of the rooftops have to be green. I just got that from a friend who’s a Japanese architect. There was an artist in Austria who proposed that everything which is horizontal should belong to the earth. That is every flat surface, every roof, should be green. So if you look from the airplane everything would be green... IT: Often when you talk about sustainability or these slow movements, it’s often going back to nature. But why does it always have to go back to nature? I don’t think that’s always positive. DS: I was working for the space industry for a while. And by the way I’m not a proponent for manned space flight at all. It’s a very un-green experience, and it’s an extremely unpleasant experience for the people who do it. As an astronaut you have to live in this environment which is shockingly horrible and there is no life designed into the process. Some of the work I proposed for these very long-term flights into space is that there should be regenerative food sources, or even just to have plants growing around the people. CS: It reminds me of what Indri was saying yesterday about the difference between Eastern and Western approaches to well-being. In the East, it’s preventative, it’s holisitic, it’s a lifestyle. Whereas in the West, with these astronauts you just want to keep them alive… The aim is not that they have an experience of well-being. IT: But maybe they have a really strong experience of well-being. DS: I know two of the astronauts who have been in space the longest, and there is definitely no well-being in space. They weren’t suffering. They were astronauts and they were Russian so they have a very special concept of wellbeing and are very hearty people. CS: That just reminded me of hearing about an early astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, who after walking on the moon realized that the most epic thing about his journey was not being on the moon but looking back at the earth from space. He saw that he was returning to a harmonious and whole living system that we’re all a part of. And when he came back he founded an organization called The Institute for Noetic Sciences, which explores, in a way, more mystical aspects of human existence and consciousness. So that, to me, is a very slow experience. That he came to actually regard the earth, and his participation in it, differently. It’s these kinds of shifts in consciousness that are critical, especially when you have a culture that is so convenience-oriented and want to shop at supermarkets and sit their kids in front of the tv all day. You can’t expect them to shift over to an environmentally sustainable lifestyle, unless it’s born of necessity… people who have lived or worked in third world countries who have seen that waste is not as much of an issue because people need to see it as food for the next system. You look across the street over here (across from the Design School in Bangalore, where the workshop took place) and people have taken garbage and thatched the roofs of their homes with it. So when there’s scarcity we become more aware of what our needs are and waste is less of an issue. MK: I think it would be really interesting to find out how to connect convenience to sustainability. The early green movements were all about denying yourself, whereas now I think it can be shown that you can really have benefits from being green. You have a benefit from slow food because I think it’s actually really good quality food. JK: I was just going to ask whether slow will not be the way green is now in ten years time. If we don’t brand slow better than green was branded… If it’s not well-published, then people’s interest in slow will also disappear. BS: I just want to make the point that it’s not necessary that going slow means not going mainstream. There is an insecurity now about, ‘Do I have to be a part of a commune now?’ You want it to be mainstream, but it can still be slow. ... more (coming soon) > |