Slow Design Principals & Autonomy, Participation, And: Response 4

Slow Design Principals

The Slow designed Principles are described as a “new interrogative and reflexive tool for design and research practice that offer an opportunity to find fresh qualities in design research, ideation, process and outcomes.” Most importantly Slow Design is a unique and vital form of creative activism that is delivering new values for design and contributing to the shift toward sustainability. The Slow Design Principals include: revealing, expanding, reflection, engagement, participation, and evolution. This text, though it provides a certain framework that suggests that by following these ‘steps’ a project will be successful, in my opinion has the potential to choke off other opportunities a work may present. However, after rereading the text, I couldn’t help but think of other examples that I felt fit in to the Strauss and Fraud-Luke’s design strategies. As students I think that is wise to take in to consideration principles such as those presented within the text. They are open enough to be applied to any project as strictly or broadly as desired by the maker. Below are two projects that I thought were other examples of how these principles could/were applied to contribute towards the “shift toward sustainability.”

Pig 05049 by Christien Meindertsma





Farm Fountain by Youngs and Rinaldo

A quick response to the Autonomy, Participation, And text by Clair Pentecost:

I found this text to be incredibly enlightening and valuable to read within the context of this course. As a student it found it interesting to read her notion of how we must produce work that becomes condensed to fit within the gallery setting to be ‘accepted’ and even then, depending on the type of work, it must jump through several sets of hoops to be shown, the more prestigious the gallery, the more hoops to jump through. Though I am guessing my thoughts have strayed from the points of the article I found it interesting to read these two selections together. Though they both touch on many similar notions, I can’t help but think that the Slow Design Principles are trying to set up a framework to aid in work production where as Pentecost’s text, though encourages and gives several examples of successful works, in the beginning points to the lack of freedoms in making art. Pentecost says “We will accept the rules because we will have worked so hard to get there, and because in every way we are starved for validation” not necessarily discourages art practice, but does highlight the problems one will face regardless of whether they follow design principals or not.