Old_Responses_Slow_Design, Past Student Work

Applications of Slow Design Principles

Posted by Sabrina on

While researching different works that use Slow Design Principles, I found a project titled     Amazingness by Anna Hillman. Amazingness, a collection of photographs taken throughout London, was Hillman’s way of presenting the sublimity and “amazingness” of nature in urban life. Through this project, Hillman captures several Slow Design Principles, particularly revealing experiences in everyday life that are often over looked. Hillman reveals the beauty that surrounds urban living and wishes for city dwellers to notice and enjoy the little things in life, such as a flower creeping between the side walk cracks. She wants her viewers to embrace the little increments of beauty that are always around us, yet are rarely noticed. An aspect of this project that really impresses me is the fact that she can take something that really is never praised in society, like wildflowers growing in sidewalk cracks and in concrete steps, and sheds a more positive and charismatic light on it.

Amazingness also calls people to engage in the society around them, which captures the Slow Design Principle of participation. Hillman hopes through this project to interact with their environments on a deeper level by showing them that wildlife is all around them. Additionally, Hillman wants her viewers to feel more connected to each other as well as to plant and wild life and to notice how we all grow together in society. Through Amazingness, Hillman wishes for people to really stop and pander about the little bits of nature in urban life. Through the principle of participation, Hillman shows people that we all share this one world which creates a stronger feeling of connection. I find this a very impressive aspect of Amazingness.

A photo from the Amazingness collection.
A second project that I found while researching was Living With Things by Monika Hoinkis, which investigates how we interact with everyday objects. Particularly, this project embraces the Slow Design Principle of engagement. In this project, Hoinkis reworks the objects in such a way that they become dependent on direct human contact. With one object, for example, Hoinkis detached the hinges of a desk lamp, rendering it only useful if it is held up with a person’s hand. This project applies the idea of fragile dependency in this way, which is a key aspect in the principle of engagement. I found this feature of the project to be the most enlightening and affective because we depend so much on everyday objects like lamps and she shows in this project how those objects rely on us as well. 
This project also requires us to reflect on how we interact and count on certain objects to be in our lives, which is a specific principle of Slow Design. Hoinkis wishes for her viewers to reflect on how we take certain objects, like lamps and umbrellas, for granted and how we can better appreciate these necessities. Further more, this project allows one to focus and reflect on not only on human and object relationships, but relationships with other humans. She implores the audience to think about those who depend on us, as well as those who we depend upon. I feel that reflecting on interdependency was really demonstrated in this project and is a very important and, in a sense, a very marvelous aspect of Living With Things. 
Interdependency
Resources:
http://www.slowlab.net/amazingness.html
http://www.slowlab.net/living_with_things.html

–Bridget Miller