Mapping Local Knowledge

One of the case studies in the The Slow Design Principles (PDF), by slowLab's Carolyn Strauss and Alistair Fuad-Luke, involves the mapping of knowledge about an area in unique ways by local people to facilitate awareness of local resources and local identity:

 With its project series, ‘Slow Ways of Knowing,’ the design collective slowLab has developed an urban design tool to capture local knowledge and elicit public contributions to urban planning debates in their localities.  Through empirical observation, sensory awareness and intuitive imagining, people are invited to connect with the histories and patterns that a given site reveals. To capture local knowledge and public imaginings about the evolving identity of the neighborhood or surrounding area, they are encouraged to annotate local area maps with their thoughts, memories, sensations, fantasies, drawings, and design gestures. By thus revealing unseen or forgotten aspects of those places, generating awareness and participation, the projects remind people of their own part in and responsibility to the life of their localities, and are encouraged into ongoing creative investigations. (slowLab, 2006-present)

As a volunteer for eco-awareness collective Edmontonians Supporting A Green Economy, this idea has intrigued me for awhile, and I've wondered how it could be used in a practical way to faciliate environmental awareness or other activist uses in an urban location. For example, could a process like this be used to identify guerrilla gardening sites, or locations of fruit trees harvested by groups like OFRE? Could it be used by a built-heritage-preservation group to create a self-directed walking tour of local architecture and historic homes? Could this process be used by community groups in mature core neighborhoods where activism and revitalization are needed  to map what makes their areas special so unique sites and qualities will be preserved? As it happens, there are some great projects out there where people have done exactly that, although they haven't always used the term "slow design" in doing it.

A group in Tokyo created a low-tech crowd-sourced map of urban gardens and put it online, and one of the originators of that project (Chris Berthelsen of A Small Lab) is also doing similar work he calls the Kokonohanashi  project (the word translates from Japanese as "talking about here"). He summarizes the goal of the project:

How can we construct low-cost, agile, fine-grained (and also scalable) ways - 

(1) for people to begin to discuss and interact with the spaces they use, and the 

other people that use them? 

(2) to record, share, the living histories of places (memories, experiences, 

feelings)

The crowd-sourced maps generated during crises like the recent Australian floods are an example of how web-based applications can be used to rapidly create a map based on a particular need or interest. Crowd-sourced cycling maps like that at bikemap.net are another great example of web-based slow mapping.

Closer to home, citizens of the Halifax Metropolitan Region in Nova Scotia helped blogger Waye Mason create a map of neighborhood names (which only exist informally in many older North American communities, unlike in Edmonton where the Federation of Community Leagues have formalized and mapped the naming of neighborhoods since practically the founding of the city). That project was, in turn, inspired by a similar project for the Toronto Star website compiled from public data and crowd-sourced input by data journalist Patrick Cain, whose website is an eye-opening tour of what is possible in creating maps from different kinds of information. Such collaborative neighborhood maps seem like a good first step toward creating even more information-rich slow mapping projects to capture the unique local identities of those cities.

So, how would YOU like to see slow, collaborative mapping techniques be used in a practical way in your community? 

Monthly Slow News Summary

Once a month or so, I'll do a roundup of interesting Slow news stories and blog posts that have come across my radar. (They'll usually be ones that I've tweeted or have made their way into the paper.li Slow Weekly auto-newsletter in the sidebar, but those can be difficult to find weeks after the fact.) Here's what's cropped up since mid-December.


The New Year always brings a rash of trend reports, and apparently Slow Design is what's next:

• Investment pieces, sustainability, slow food, artisanal quality: Opening Ceremony on the Next Ten Years http://bit.ly/fvxxeR
• Inhabitat's roundup of green design predictions from a range of industry experts: http://inhabitat.com/green-design-predictions-for-2011/
• Trend Spotting: Sobriety for Home and Textiles | Handmade Spark http://bit.ly/dGxv7S
• {Local, personalized, innovative. Sounds like Slow Home to me!} interior design trends of 2011: The Independent http://ind.pn/idULq5
• Natural Home Magazine pick their top 15 from JWT's 2011 Trends report: http://www.naturalhomemagazine.com/natural-home-living/2011-trends-bamboo-biomimcry-standards.aspx

On Slow Travel:

• Slow Travel: The Next Trend? http://bit.ly/hB7YvY
• How To Go On A Volunteer Holiday http://t.co/jsEmZpP

On Slow Architecture:

• Care2's introduction to Slow Architecture http://www.care2.com/greenliving/what-is-slow-architecture.html

On Slow Fashion:

• DIY “Colour-In” Dress is a Coloring Book You Can Wear http://bit.ly/ihkMAk
• Tom Ford, Slowing Down Fashion http://www.goodlifer.com/2011/01/tom-ford-slowing-down-fashion/

On Slow Food:

• Food Prices Worldwide To Soar In Next Decade http://natpo.st/g3LGEv
• Well Preserved did a compelling series of posts exploring different ways of thinking about eating locally and the 100-Mile ideal: http://wellpreserved.ca/2011/01/05/re-imagining-the-100-mile-diet/
• Slow Food and Worldwatch Institute's State of the World 2011 report http://www.slowfood.com/international/slow-stories/87945/state-of-the-world-2011/q=24D19D?-session=query_session:42F9428102973278FEWTy284F02E

On Slow Living:

• Because multitasking is overrated. Doing Less To Get More Done http://bit.ly/hRrgKe
• Lead in Your Grocery Bag? Corporate America’s Latest Scare Tactic: http://bit.ly/gw8akq
• New generation of homebuyers have new {old} ideas about home: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/ontheblock/detail?entry_id=81136&type=realestate

On Sustainability:

• Oh dear. Problems with Long-Term Carbon Capture & Storage in Saskatchewan suggest it doesn't stay underground. http://ow.ly/1aPbox
• project of 1-line rebuttals to 136 arguments by climate deniers with science backup. http://bit.ly/ej5KZt
• notable new book: The New Normal: Agenda for Responsible Living - by David Wann ('Simple Prosperity') http://amzn.to/hR020C

Traveling to Japan (and Wabi-Sabi's Relationship to the Slow Movement)

My husband and I have just started planning a two-week visit to Japan, as our gift to each other for our 40th birthdays. It's our first international trip together, since living thousands of miles from our extended family means that almost all our travel budget goes toward trips home to Nova Scotia.

The route our tour will take is roughly outlined in pink. 

Of course, fifteen days is far too little time to truly immerse yourself in a culture as different from ours as Japan's, but it will have to do. As our starting point, we've chosen a whirlwind tour (mostly by train) from the experts at Japan Travel Bureau that will give us some time at each stopping point to explore the things that interest us most. It obviously won't be a textbook slow-travel trip, but we hope to incorporate elements of the slow-travel approach into it, by using our flexible time to learn about regional history, crafts and foods, and experiencing at least a couple of days of the trip as a typical Tokyoite might (We are going during mid-May, after the national holidays in early May are over, so that should help.).  I'm excited to observe an existing bicycle culture and widespread public transit use, and interested to see how else (or even if) Japan is moving toward sustainability in other areas. Witnessing the cultural juxtaposition of Fast & Slow and the small-space living innovations that you see so prominently in huge cities like Tokyo will be amazing. 

We'll be spending 4 days in Tokyo; 1 day admiring the area around Mount Fuji; 1 day each in hot spring resort town Hakone, Takayama with its unchanged Edo-period streetscapes, and feudal town Kanazawa; 2 days in Kyoto, where the handicraft centre is definitely on my list; 1 day each in Nagasaki and Hiroshima; then finishing up with an extra day in Tokyo. (Our flying days make the total 15 days.) We hope to wedge in daytrips to Nagoya to visit a friend from grad school, to the peony garden at Tsukuba, and to the Ghibli Museum and the Sayama Forest (to say we're fans of animator Hayao Miyazaki would be an understatement).

(One friend has joked with me that a tightly-scheduled tour is how the typical Japanese tourist sees their own country. Having witnessed the hordes of bus-tour travellers in the Canadian Rockies and on Prince Edward Island, she may have a point.)

Planning the trip also has me thinking about wabi-sabi and its relationship to the Slow movement. To my mind, the best primer for a Western audience that I've read on the Japanese concepts of wabi & sabi and their application to homes and lifestyle is Robyn Briggs-Lawrence's The Wabi-Sabi House. It's a richly satisfying read, and has had a huge influence on my thinking. As I wrote when I reviewed it,

The concept of wabi includes harmony, balance, simplicity, and humility; sabi translates literally as "the bloom of time". Taken together, the words describe the beauty of everyday, functional objects that we cherish because they are well-used, patinated, handmade, and tied to memories. It's living in the moment, modestly and authentically.

Of course, this is a vast oversimplification of a way of life that's difficult to explain in few words. It also leaves out the huge influences of seasonal rhythms, local availability, resource scarcity, and population pressures in a closed society that shaped the philosophy, not to mention the spiritual influence of Zen Buddhism. 

Seasonal. Local. Handcrafted. Can you see why I connect wabi-sabi with the Slow movement? So naturally, one of my goals during the trip is to deepen my understanding of wabi-sabi.

By the time of my trip, Briggs-Lawrence's followup book Simply Imperfect will have been released in North America (You know what's on my wish list.). I'm also, after reading others' reviews, aching to read The Unknown Craftsman - one of the few other books in English about the topic that hasn't been singled out as a cliched cultural mishmash by knowledgeable reviewers, in large part because it is translated from the essays of a Japanese expert. 

I'm also currently reading Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green From Traditional Japan by architect Azby Brown, in which he explores late-Edo-period Japan as a model sustainable society and looks at technologies and strategies that can be adapted for modern use, many of which are no longer used in modern Japan. It's a densely written cultural history, with brilliant hand-drawn illustrations. I'll be on the watch for examples of what I've read in that book, too.

Also on my to-read list, besides the usual travel guides: Dave Barry Does Japan, at hubby's insistence; Will Ferguson's Hitching Rides With Buddha; and Lafcadio Hearn's 1896 collection of Japanese folklore Kokoro. 

So, for readers who have lived or travelled in Japan: Can you think of anything I should add to my reading list? Is there anything we should try to experience (or anything we should avoid)?

Everyone else: can you think of more ways to slow down a whirlwind tour?

Slow Travel: Bicycle-Friendly Hotels

Via

We're crowd-sourcing a list of hotels and hostels that rent bicycles as an amenity for their guests over at Loop-Frame Love, a vintage bicycle blog where I am a coauthor. Why mention it here?

Well, Slow Travel is all about engaging with the local culture, trying local foods, and checking out local independently-owned shops and galleries in the less-touristy areas of your destination - and walking and cycling are a wonderful way to get a feeling for the place you're visiting and what makes it unique. Slow Travel is about connecting with the place you're visiting in a more meaningful, mindful way, rather than flying in and rushing around for 36 sleep-deprived hours to see all the sights before you must catch the flight home.

My favourite memories of a visit to New Orleans aren't of the tourist traps in the French Quarter and the fake Mardi Gras parades thrown for the benefit of conference attendees, but a day spent meandering through the residential neighborhoods and indie shopping districts along Magazine Street, and an evening in a soul-food bistro recommended by one of the shopkeepers I met. Before that day, I felt like a visitor; after that day, I felt like a guest.

If you're new to the idea of Slow Travel, I recommend the excellent Jorg & Olif blog's "So, How Do You Travel Slowly?" - it's an excellent primer on ways to plan your vacation with slow principles in mind.

Slow Pastime: Making Hand-Hooked Textiles

Once upon a time, seemingly a lifetime ago, I was an unhappy biochemistry grad student whose supervisor suggested that, since I enjoyed it so much, maybe I should hook rugs for a living instead.

"Artist at work" by Pat Kight (Creative Commons licence).

I considered it for a heartbeat - longed for it, actually. I loved rug hooking. I loved hunting for wool skirts at thrift shops, then felting the fabric to use as-is or overdye. I loved the half-science-half-alchemy of using acid dyes in a big enamelware lobster pot to alter the colour of a piece of recycled woolen fabric. I loved the moving meditation of cutting the strips with a hand-cranked cutting machine, and of hooking itself: push, hook, lift loop, repeat. I loved my hook, handmade by my great-grandfather for my maternal grandmother, a tangible reminder that I was carrying on a family tradition. I loved the challenge of getting the tension right so your finished mat wouldn't ripple or pull. I loved applying colour theory and choosing textural variations to make a pattern pop. I loved the camaraderie of hook-ins and guild meetings, loved soaking up the wisdom of the inspiring women surrounding me. I learnt to crochet and whip-stitch so I could get a professional-looking finish on the rug's edges.

Neither of these rugs are my handwork; they are antiques from my collection. The naive, coloring-book style is typical of utilitarian hooked rugs made by rural women before World War Two, although these may be later examples from Mennonite colonies where the style has persisted. I love the bold colour schemes of these rugs, and the evidence of reuse: the beiges and peaches in the blue mat are pantyhose, and the white background of the pansy rug almost certainly started its life as long woolen underwear from Stanfield's.

However. I had already done my financial homework: all the hooked rug artisans I knew were operating at a significant loss and being subsidized by significant others with day jobs or substantial retirement savings, despite busy schedules travelling to teach at camps and hook-ins, creating patterns and kits for sale through their fledgling e-businesses and basement workshops, exhibiting and selling their handwork in galleries, and writing books and magazine articles that educated the public and showcased their expertise. They continued their work purely for the love of the craft. These were not isolated stories; I knew many of the leading teacher-designers of the day. The received wisdom was that most fine crafts, like rug hooking, were expensive and time-consuming hobbies even for renowned artisans. 

I told my advisor to get real.

It was 1995, and I was the compiler of the Rug Hooking Frequently Asked Questions file posted to the Usenet rec.crafts newsgroups, editor of the WOOLGATHERINGS e-zine/newsletter, and webmistress of the HOOKED! website and the then-new website of Rug Hooking Magazine. There were no WYSIWYG editors, so coding the HTML by hand for those sites was a considerable accomplishment. My husband spent days rendering a single realistic image of a rug hook for the now primitive-looking Rug Hooking Online logo:

Much has changed in the past 15 years. I completed my degree, worked for several years in biomedical research, started collections of antique hooked rugs and antique hooks, started a family, and switched careers. Like most young rugmakers, the demands of my career and family left little time for hooking, or for maintaining websites, and I gradually drifted on to other pursuits (There is a reason that most hobbyist rug hookers are retirees). Archived versions of my articles and the FAQ  from that time were generously hosted for a few years by Rug Hooking Magazine, but gradually destroyed through server changes and editorial staff switchovers; few remnants of them remain online now. I'm sure I have the original files on floppy disks somewhere; I really should rescue them and give them new life.

The past 15 years have also brought unprecedented changes to the fine craft industry, most notably the ability to directly market and sell your work to the public through online communities like Etsy and ArtFire. Blogs abound with inspirational stories about people who quit their day jobs and followed their passions to become full-time makers. Craft itself has had an extreme image makeover, going from quaint and old-fashioned to young and hip.

Fifteen years later, I'm pleased to see small hooked items and rugmaking supplies selling quickly on Etsy - I created the treasury above to show the variety and depth of the work being sold by emerging rugmakers there.

However, I particularly want to bear witness to the success of Red Spruce, who are using the traditional rugmaking technique to create large-scale rugs with a modern colour palette and design sensibility. (That they're based in my hometown of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia gives me a completely unreasonable feeling of pride in the rave reviews of their recent exhibition at NYDC's Odegard and nomination for a Best of Year Award from Interior Design magazine. As if I was somehow responsible. Heh.) Theirs isn't just a craft success story, though; it's also a story about slow design. They chose to keep the creation of their rugs in Nova Scotia, using traditional techniques and materials. They use the word "terroir" to describe their work in their manifesto. Need I say more?

Detail of Boardwalk, by Robin Gray for Red Spruce, 

an abstracted historic map of downtown Halifax and the Citadel. 

Please go to Red Spruce's site and look at their complete portfolio.

These artists' work has me so inspired to pull out my stash of wool and start hooking again. I have several rugs close to completion, and ideas for the designs of several more. Poke me and ask me how they're coming if I haven't posted anything more about them in six months or so.

What is Slow Design?

pink snail by °Dirk. (Creative Commons licence.)

(This post is a synthesis and update of my two previous posts on slow design on the ecoDomestica reDesign blog. Every blog needs a keystone post or manifesto; this is that post for Sustainable Slow Stylish.)

Slow Design is a philosophical cousin of several movements with similar goals: slow food, slow fashion, Platform 21's Repair Manifesto, relearning traditional skills, transition initiatives, voluntary simplicity, and the Zen Buddhist concept of wabi-sabi. Some bloggers have misconstrued the principles behind all these movements as being simply a variant of the old Alexander Keith's India Pale Ale slogan, "Slowly, Carefully, Taking The Time To Get It Right." Others seem to think keeping it local is the key to being Slow. Those are good starting points, but I think the principles of the slow movement go much deeper, right to the core of our behaviour as consumers. As they become more widely adopted, they'll have the potential to be truly world-changing. 

The published Slow Design Principles (Strauss and Fuad-Luke, see www.slowlab.net) are couched in academic language, and the case studies cited mostly involve the design of objects or artistic installations. However, the principles and practices of Slow Design are tools that are useful to sustainable designers, decorators, and artisans of all disciplines. To summarize (and loosely quote) that document's main points:

Slow Design:

• facilitates 'slowness' and provides a balance to the industrial-consumerist model of design.
• seeks to shift the user's awareness and attitudes about materials, processes, time, and natural environment.
• reveals experiences and materials that are often missed or forgotten.
• strives for truthful, exposed use of materials and process (so the hand of the maker is visible).
• facilitates creative interaction between the user and the object or its location.
• makes users think about where the object came from, inducing contemplation & 'reflective consumption'.
• allows the object to change, grow, or alter over time to reflect its history and usage, and continue to be used; and reflects its history prior to its current usage.
• comes from open-source, collaborative, transparent, and evolving processes.
• focuses on localness and community, through collaborations and co-design with the local community and local artisans, mapping and using local knowledge, reflecting local values & visual vernacular, and using affordable local materials, to give the finished design an authentic sense of place.
• celebrates diversity and pluralism by engaging a large range of stakeholders in the planning process. (For example, the charette process used in LEED building projects.)
• recognizes the urgent need for stewardship of the natural environment and resources, as well as honoring local knowledge and traditions, and encouraging engagement with place.

So, slow design is thoughtfully conceived, thought-provoking, flexible in use, collaborative, personalized, timeless, and sustainable. Slow design is not anti-industrial, per se, but it asks its users to think of themselves as codesigners or participants, instead of as passive consumers. Process is also important in slow design, and can involve creating open-source data and holding do-it-yourself workshops in order to foster collaboration, build skills, and stimulate conversations around local issues. Slow design is, at its heart, about making holistic choices that support communities and their traditions and skills. 


Furthermore, the frugality and do-it-yourself aspects of slow design really lend themselves to our changed economy. The Shelton Group's green marketing blog has noted this shift and suggested that marketers are going to need to pay attention to it, instead of just appealing to 'a more aspirational way of life' in order to sell products.

This list illustrates what these ideas mean in everyday life:

Slow Design is:                                                  Slow Design isn't:

authentic                                                           mannered, artificial, phoney

heirloom-quality                                                 semi-disposable

refurbished Victorian homes                                 NeoVictorian subdivisions

modern (while respecting the past)                      like living in a museum exhibit

gardens                                                             outdoor living rooms

rain barrels & watering cans                                automatic irrigation systems

clotheslines                                                        tumble dryers

timeless                                                             trend-driven

cedar shakes                                                       vinyl siding

handmade                                                          machine-made

reupholstering & refinishing                                  buying new

Etsy                                                                   Ikea

personalized and creative                                     impersonal and off-the-shelf

local                                                                   imported

reduce, reuse, recycle                                          buy, buy, buy

limited-edition or one-off                                     mass-produced

renewable                                                           fossil fueled

high quality                                                         brand-name-driven 'luxury'
thought-provoking                                                thoughtless
walkable, bikeable neighborhoods                         car-centric gated 'communities'
built for the ages                                                 planned obsolescence

...So, what do the principles of slow design mean to you?