Comics are often a rather disposable medium.  Even online, individual comics are seen one time and quickly forgotten.  Randell Munroe’s project, Time, challenges that by expanding the lifespan of a comic, turning it into an evolving work with a beginning and an end.  Every hour, the picture updated, slowly unveiling a frame-by-frame story told over months.  Now, if you look at the site, all that remains is the final frame:

After all, time doesn’t reverse, so the story only played out once.  Luckily, other sites have taken it upon themselves to host the work in its entirety, which is now the only way to view the piece in full.  However, viewing it as a short animation looses the original evolution of the piece over time; it becomes an animation freely explorable.  The original presentation of Time forced the viewer to consider the comic as evolving, a constantly changing narrative that slowly unveiled itself.  The comic could no longer be viewed as a still image, as one would normally see it.

 

 

In the physical world, the Aria Stone Gallery is an interesting example of Slow Design being put into use.  The gallery is a stone supplier, selling slabs to be cut for various purposes.  However, instead of simply supplying various types of stone, they hunt out artistically interesting slabs, displaying and treating them as works of art in the gallery.

While, in the end, this is still a method of advertising, displaying these slabs in a true gallery setting forces the viewer to reflect on the intrinsic beauty of them.  It makes one question their use and, personally, makes the reality of their eventual sale and “destruction” or transformation into a countertop or wall somewhat disheartening.

 

 

If I was to attempt to create something off of slow design principles, my first thought goes to the computer I’m typing this on.  Computer components and, more generally, their materials, are sourced from throughout the world.  I would like to encourage people to see that chain that results in this product, both for the path the resources take to end up as chips and the other costs associated with this production.

While doing anything of the sort would certainly be impossible without controlling the hardware, I’d imagine each component having a window pop up when it was first installed, tracing its origins, listing the factory it was produced at, the sources for its raw materials, etc.  It would be a full trace of each components origins, de-anonymizing them.

Afterwards, I would love to have each part continue to update it’s story.  Preferably there would be an online portal where anyone could see the locations of any part (anonymized), what it is installed in, how it is used, allowing each person who buys a computer to see their computer’s entire life cycle laid out before them, alongside every other.  It would draw the purchaser in as an active participant, continuing the story further beyond just the manufacturing of the component.