Slow Credo
As with food, design philosophy emphasizes taking one's time to create furnishings with materials found close to home
Published: Saturday, February 16, 2008 at 3:28 a.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, February 16, 2008 at 3:28 a.m.
‘‘Ihave a little spiel I like to give about thread,” Natalie Chanin said the other day. “The ladies laugh at me and call it my Oprah moment, but here’s how it goes: It’s called loving your thread, and it’s all about talking to the thread, coaxing it to take
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Natalie Chanin of Alabama Chanin sells hand-stitched and embroidered textiles made from old T-shirts or neckties.
New York Timesthe path of least resistance. At the crux of it, that’s what Slow Design is all about.”
Chanin runs a company, Alabama Chanin, that sells exquisite hand-stitched garments made from old T-shirts and home goods like flea market chairs with seats woven out of Goodwill neckties.
Designed by Chanin and her collaborator, Butch Anthony, and handmade by artisans — the ladies, as she calls them — in her hometown of Florence, Ala., her products are examples of Slow Design, which is not so much a metabolic term as it is a philosophical one.
Slow means that Alabama Chanin is run on the tenets of the Slow Food movement, which essentially challenges one to use local ingredients harvested and put together in a socially and environmentally responsible way. Above all it emphasizes slowness in the creation and consumption of products as a corrective to the
frenetic pace of 21st-century life. “Good, clean and fair” is the Slow Food credo, and it has — rather slowly — begun to make its way out of the kitchen and into the rest of the house.
While Slow Food is now in its third decade, an established global movement with an official manifesto and about 85,000 members in more than 100 countries, Slow Design is still in its infancy.
But it does have an increasing number of proselytizers, like John Brown, an architect in Calgary, Alberta, whose year-old Web site, theslowhome.com, urges consumers
to say no to “fast-food architecture,” and Geir Berthelsen, a Norwegian motivational
speaker whose Web site slowplanet.com, which is to go online in mid-March, has as its goal to be a hub for all things slow, from slow travel to slow shopping to slow design, he said.
Chanin, meanwhile, has a book, “Alabama Stitch Book: Projects and Stories Celebrating Hand-Sewing, Quilting, and Embroidery for Contemporary Sustainable Design” (Stewart, Tabori & Chang) due out in March. It gives instructions on how to make her stenciled, poetry-embellished sheets and teaches her Slow credo, which
is to use discarded materials to make something new — and to take as long as necessary doing it.
Ephemeral objects
For some designers, that means leaving the studio.
Christien Meindertsma, a Dutch designer, knits rugs on needles as long as yardsticks with wool spun from the fleece of Welsh sheep she’s seen in person. That’s very slow, meeting your wool. (Meindertsma’s company is called Flocks.) Other objects for the home are being designed to operate like speed bumps for those who may be living life too fast: Thorunn Arnadottir, an Icelandic designer, made a clock using a string of beads draped over a notched metal disc. One bead
drops every five minutes, marking time in a way that seems to slow it down. Remove
the beads, and you get to stop time.
A rattan basket designed by Alastair Fuad-Luke, a British sustainable design facilitator, as he described himself recently, will tip over if filled too quickly, “thus momentarily slowing you down as you rebalance it,” explained Fuad-Luke.
A student of Fuad-Luke’s once designed an actual speed bump for a living room. “You’d either step over it,” he said, “or perhaps you’d lie down and give it a cuddle.”
Katrin Svana Eythorsdottir, another designer from Iceland, made a “chandelier” from
beads of glucose that clung to twine and caught the natural light. After five months, the chandelier disintegrated (as Eythorsdottir, who wanted to create a temporary, biodegradable object, had intended).
It is true that a decomposing chandelier seems sort of fast, but as it turns out, a domestic object with a built-in expiration date is a slow notion, said Carolyn Strauss, a designer, curator and the founder of Slow-Lab, a three-year-old design think tank with offices in New York and Amsterdam that’s devoted to searching out the slow
in cutting-edge design.
“You wouldn’t buy that chandelier and go away on a twoweek vacation,” Strauss said.
“It’s an object you’d really cherish because of its temporary and therefore precious nature.”
Slowest sofa ever made
Strauss admires what she calls the slowest sofa ever made, a group project from
Raw Nerve, a graphic design and branding company in London.
Their Life Is Suite couch began as a tufted leather number that eight Raw Nerve designers found on the street one day a few years ago.
“We could see it had quite a life,” said Kieran McMillan, Raw Nerve’s director, who explained how the designers spent weeks creating eight imaginary stories — about a couple bickering, for example, and a grandfather reading to a child — and printed them on fabric with which they reupholstered the sofa.
“We also thought about all the things that might have fallen in between the seats, like coins and playing cards and the heel of a shoe, and made images of those, too. Then we thought about the parents of the sofa — which is made from wood and leather — so there’s a picture of a cow and a tree on there as well.”
Unlike similar sofas and chairs they’ve made since, this Life Is Suite sofa is not for
sale. “It’s our pride and joy,” McMillan said.
When slow goes fast
Slow may be green and ecofriendly, but it tucks more into its pockets. While Pottery
Barn’s new Botanica line of furniture is made with sustainable materials like soy foam, organic cotton and recycled plastic bottles, that it is massproduced from cotton grown in India means it can never be slow.
Here’s a poignant example of slow gone fast. Natalie Chanin’s first company, Project Alabama, also ran on slow principles, making couture garments hand-stitched by the same ladies who now work at Alabama Chanin. But it was so
successful — with hosannas from Vogue magazine and $2 million in sales in 2005 — that Chanin’s business partners decided to outsource the work to India.
Since the company abandoned its original mission, said Chanin, who resigned in
2006, “I decided to start over.”
Slow, as Carl Honore, a Canadian journalist living in London, pointed out, is sometimes just a state of mind. His 2005 book, “In Praise of Slow: Challenging
the Cult of Speed” (HarperOne), collected all manner of slow movements, from
tantric sex to Slow Food to the Society for the Deceleration of Time, a civic group based Austria that once called on Olympics organizers to award gold medals to athletes who had the slowest times.
“Sometimes it’s more of a click in attitude than anything else,” said Honore, who once got a speeding ticket on his way to a Slow Food meal in Italy, where the movement was born.
Working smarter Slow is also an idea, it seems, whose time has come.
“When I was researching the book,” he continued, “if you Googled slow movement, there wasn’t anything. As a growing cultural quake it just wasn’t there. Now, of course, there are hundreds of sites, and every week I get an e-mail from a
student wanting to write his or her thesis on slow cities or slow design.”
As a result, traffic and queries at inpraiseofslow.com, Honore’s blog, are overwhelming him, and he’s handing off his slow duties to Slowplanet, a Web site that he and Berthelsen are setting up together.
“The time is now ripe for trying to formalize this slow revolution,” Berthelsen, the
founder of the World Institute of Slowness, an advocacy group based in Kristiansand, Norway, said slowly last week. (He’d been to the dentist, he explained,
and the Novocain hadn’t worn off yet).
In his lectures to corporate Europe, Berthelsen urges workers to work smarter, not faster or harder, and to become more aware of the process than the product. “I always lived under the mantra that the fast will beat the big but the slow will
beat the fast.”
In a world on hyperdrive, science is proving him to be right. A 2005 study sponsored
by Hewlett-Packard showed that the IQs of workers who responded quickly to the constant barrage of e-mails they received during the day fell 10 points, more than double the IQ drop of someone smoking marijuana.
“Fast isn’t turning us into Masters of the Universe,” Honore said. “It’s turning us into
Cheech and Chong.”
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