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dialogue
participants: Greg Foley, V Magazine, ooco.com Peter Hall, design.umn.edu John Houshmand, organic furniture Emmanuelle Linard, Edelkoort, inc. Kyong Park, International Center for Urban Ecology (ICUE) Carolyn F. Strauss, slowLab
more dialogues: 09 Dec 03 (Bangalore, India) >
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> dialogue 03 April 2003 ... CS: Slow resists and responds to the fast pace of contemporary culture. Its not just about how everything has to move slowly all the time, its more of a quality issue. When you take time to pause and go deeper, you get closer to the essence of a situation or to your creativity, which ultimately accelerates you forward. I find that with meditation, for example—if I sit down for a few minutes of quiet I get so much clarity that I can’t get any other way… JH: On any given day you go back and forth on this gradient of your existence, more often than not being whipped and driven by what’s around you, your own internal incessant talking… even if you’re in a fairly creative, applied moment in your work, there’s a lot of static and a lot of external forces that are pulling you along. When you go into a deeply meditative state, you are self-emanating, in a state of high receptivity. You are not receiving horizontally any more, you are receiving vertically. So that feeds you, you’re refreshed and you can go forward—it’s always fast around you, but then you’re fast for a change. GF: But it has to come back. Nothing stops ever, so you can never achieve an ideal slow. There is no slow without fast. ... CS: One of the other dangers that Adriaan Beukers from Delft University of Technology talks about is that manufacturing has become so automated that we have lost touch with the idiosyncrasies of the materials and what we can actually do with them. I don’t know if we’re the zombies or the materials are, but there’s no pause. JH: The substance is de-valued. It’s all conceptual, as opposed to putting something in your hand, learning about it and exposing yourself to it. I find that with ‘virtual reality,’ and so much else that is going on right now, there is such a move to de-value the substance. People don’t know where anything comes from, how it’s made. EL: They don’t care. JH: They want another one today and another one tomorrow. It’s a pretty deep illness. PH: A lot of this seems to be about how much control we do or we don’t have. I was just thinking about this project up at MIT to introduce mass-customized housing. So it would be housing built on the model of cars. You know how the idea is to get online and ‘pick your car’ and GM will build it for you…
CS: It’s the illusion of control. JH: You’re taking something that somebody is giving you and choosing at best. PH: You’re made distant from the product of your labors. GF: You could even enter Levittown into the sales pitch. It isn’t ‘not’ it, it actually is the new Levittown. It’s been included completely. PH: Actually they make reference to Gropius’ packaged house. JH: That’s what Levi’s did for jeans for a while, didn’t they? CS: Levi’s had kiosks where you enter your dimensions and got ‘personalized’ jeans. PH: I like the spirit of going against that. But the challenge is to develop strategies that enable you to encourage bypassing those infrastructures. Because we ‘re so… they control us. KP: Who are they? PH: The infrastructures. KP: Is the infrastructure people? Or has it evolved on its own so that it is itself and even those that thinks they’re controlling us are actually not able to control the infrastructure either. It leads to its own religious level of its own, as if it has its own life organism or something. It seems like that’s what you’re suggesting. GF: It’s hard not to find yourself separating things again—‘us’ and ‘them.’ KP: It’s like knowledge. Knowledge is like a large body, almost like a globe. None of us have full possession of it, so it exists by itself. As a kind of metaphor. JH: well, it’s a commodifying infrastructure that is capitalizing on your human desire to be creative, and rather than selling you the garbage they sold you yesterday, today they are selling you some garbage under the premise that you are participating in some sphere of industrial creation of product. Whereas there would be another sphere of knowledge that would be perhaps more value-added sphere of knowledge that is more referential to your ecological source—let’s say ‘natural knowledge’ sphere. And perhaps there’s another sphere outside of that that’s more abstract. So that particular sphere you’re talking about is a commodifying sphere. I think it would be helpful to differentiate between those things. CS: I think it would be interesting for designers to have this kind of knowledge resource. So a designer could say, ‘this is the idea I’m working on--- where does it sit in relationship to those spheres? For example, in relation to the ecological source? ... CS: Kyong, can you talk a little bit about what you’re doing in Detroit? Because I see it as a very slow exercise. KP: I think it’s because I’m very slow. It’s really a problem and I don’t know how to fix it. CS: But you’re talking about ‘slow’ in terms of speed, how long it takes for you to get something done. Whereas ‘slow design’ is not about whether you’re getting something done, but it sort of bolsters the equation. GF: It’s holistic. I read this book and I think it runs parallel to this discussion. It was a 70’s pop bestseller called ‘Sugar Blues.’ It’s just so great to look at it again, this same struggle, nutritionally and biologically. The book charts the history of domination by different cultures on this planet via sugar. And the slave trade. And how refined sugar spread around the world and crashed societies. None of this is taught. I’m surprised that this isn’t taught in high school. KP: I think salt too. GF: If you look back at holistic diets. When they figured out that refined sugar is poison to the human system, is anti-nutritive. And when it was first discovered and used like any other white powder drug, very expensive. Like aluminum, which was one of the highest iterations of design in art nouveau, and now we have it as coke cans and we don’t even think twice about it. And titanium will follow. We just have to figure out how to get it out faster and cheaper. CS: Except it’s not a renewable resource. GF: For example, sugar was outlawed in terms of brewing beer. Breweries were all natural, things took their course in fermenting and beer drinkers were proud. It was a home industry. As soon as they started sophisticating, using sugar to speed up the process (and it just happens to be addictive), they would do a test by pouring a bit on the bar seat (which tended to be leather) and if it stuck then the brewer was thrown out of town! And then it became normal. Industry took over and made money from it and the legal system came in and drew up rules. Once laws were defined, then it was allowed. And it’s been allowed and allowed to the point where we have a diabetes epidemic that we’re only just waking up to. And in this book, it talks about how keepers of ancient dietary knowledge/understanding, aware of mind, body and spirit keep things holistic. And in western society, here’s the course of humanity and we’re only obsessed with today and yesterday, what just happened, and barely looking at all of this simplified understanding, because it looks to simple. And the medical industry and the health industry have been split. EL: Everything we drink has sugar and salt in it. GF: You’d be hard-pressed to find something without the 10 different names they have to hide the fact that it’s sugar. Even honey has been refined to the point where it is almost metabolized like sugar. CS: Well the commercial beekeepers now just feed the bees sugar so they don’t lose time and money while the bees go out to flowers to get the stuff they need to make the honey. But if you know what your source is and you have local beekeeper… JH: A slow beekeeper! KP: Why do we insist on freedom in Iraq? It’s like feeding sugar to the bees... ... |