“I have a little spiel I like to give about thread,” Natalie Chanin said. “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 the 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 such as flea-market chairs with seats woven out of Goodwill neckties. Designed by Chanin and her collaborator, Butch Anthony, and hand-made 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.
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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, such as John Brown, an architect in Calgary, Alberta, whose year-old Web site, theslowhome .com, urges consumers to say no to “fast-food architecture.” Geir Berthelsen, a Norwegian motivational speaker, has recently launched slowplanet.com. . He said the site’s goal is to be a hub for all things slow, from slow travel to slow shopping to slow design.
Chanin, meanwhile, has a book, “Alabama Stitch Book: Projects and Stories Celebrating Hand-Sewing, Quilting, and Embroidery for Contemporary Sustainable Design” (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 176 pages, $35), . 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.
Slow at home
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.
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, 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 SlowLab, a 3-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 two-week vacation,” Strauss said. “It’s an object you’d really cherish because of its temporary and therefore precious nature.”
Slow may be green and eco-friendly, but it tucks more into its pockets. While Pottery Barn’s new Botanica line of furniture is made with sustainable materials such as soy foam, organic cotton and recycled plastic bottles, that it is mass-produced 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, 320 pages, $24.95), collected all manner of slow movements, from tantric sex to Slow Food to the Society for the Deceleration of Time, a civic group based in Austria that once called on Olympics organizers to award gold medals to athletes who had the slowest times.
Time has come
“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.
Slow is also is 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, the Web site he and Berthelsen set up together.
“The time is now ripe for trying to formalize this slow revolution,” said Berthelsen, the founder of the World Institute of Slowness, an advocacy group based in Kristiansand, Norway.
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.”
Brown would go even further, suggesting that fast can make you fat and make you sick.
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Brown and others are essentially rebranding familiar ideas — like those of the New Urbanists, for example — not only about how to build responsibly but how to stay grounded in a too-fast, overdeveloped age.
“Slow is just a new word to understand old problems,” Honore said. “It’s a refreshening of ideas that have been there since time immemorial. But there’s a new appeal about the word slow. It’s pithy, it’s countercultural.”
But it may not be American. Honore’s publisher in the United States couldn’t get a handle on the word. “They thought it was ungrammatical or something,” he said. Which is why in this country his book is titled, “In Praise of Slowness,” much to Honore’s amusement. “Slow is the word that’s escaped from the Anglosphere and attached itself to everything going,” he said, listing a few examples, like Italy’s Slow Cities and Japan’s Slow Life movement, “whereas Slowness hasn’t.”
In any case, evangelists for the movement are coming to New York, America’s fastest city, on Feb. 25. On that day, members of the Art of Slow Living, an Italian civic group, will be handing out symbolic speeding tickets to frantic pedestrians, said its organizer, Bruno Contigiani — that is, if he can get a permit from the Parks Department to organize in Union Square. Feb. 25 falls on a Monday, which, as Contigiani pointed out in an e-mail message, is a hard day to slow down.