The Slow Life Picks Up Speed

Great article by Penelope Green in The New York Times on Slow Design...designers that Slow Food priniciples of "good, clean and fair" in their work.

Here's an excerpt...
"I HAVE 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 the path of least resistance. At the crux of it, that’s what Slow Design is all about.”

Ms. Chanin runs a company, Alabama Chanin, that sells hand-stitched garments made from old T-shirts and home goods like flea market chairs with seats woven out of Goodwill neckties. Designed by Ms. 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.

While Slow Food is now in its third decade, an established global movement with an official manifesto and about 85,000 members in over 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. Ms. 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.

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. (Ms. Meindertsma’s company is called Flocks.)"

To read the whole article, click here.