A "slower" approach to design is making inroads in the critical discourse on sustainability and disposable culture. In this context, "slower" does not refer to the length of design and production, but rather to a holistic approach to creative thinking, process and product. It has to do with an extended sense of design, a sense of responsibility for everyday actions, and a richness of personal and community experience.

In this context, wood is becoming increasingly popular as a basic design raw material. The natural look and texture, with its inherent sustainability, makes wood ideal for slow design. The National Gallery of Applied Arts in Berlin, Germany, and the American Hardwood Export Council launched the SLOW project, in which the project organizers selected four woods, red oak, cherry, soft maple and hard maple, which are currently being used to a limited extent, and invited young designers to combine their interests and experiences to explore The young designers were invited to explore the possibilities of these woods as a raw material for design.

The finished products of the "Slow" project form the exhibition "SLOW: Slow Design for Fast Change". These works are currently on display at the German National Museum of Applied Arts. Today, it is important to consider the topics of materials, longevity and sustainability, and the SLOW project is a perfect match from here," says Claudia Banz, curator of the gallery.

Garth Roberts, one of the project mentors, believes that wood is a natural material that is relevant to everyone's life. It is a basic element, like stone, fire, and elements that everyone has been exposed to at least a thousand times in their lives. While mentoring young designers, Roberts listens to their stories and tries to find an inner connection, asking, "What does wood mean to you personally?" This questioning process gives designers the opportunity to dig deeper and find specific entry points that make wood a special creative material.
"Again; Collection" (RE; Collection) is a sculptural storage system made of American cherry, soft and hard maple and red oak. Its creator, Hansil Heo, started from the definition of "slow" and began to think about "slow design". She asked herself, what is "slow"? Slow doesn't mean stagnant, it appears to have stopped, but in reality, it's still changing. This change is not immediately visible to the naked eye, but by recording, we know that the change has occurred.

Korean culture, which focuses on history and heritage, is the inspiration for this work. Han Shixu, a designer from South Korea, was first associated with the wood and his tree. In Korean tradition, when a family welcomes a newborn, the parents plant a tree. The tree grows with the child, becoming their playground, shelter and playmate. After that, it may become a piece of furniture or a raw material for a coffin, and people and trees are connected again in this way. "Again; The key words of "collection" are "memory" and "collection", and the designer hopes to use this work to help users consciously collect personal belongings around them, but also collect personal memories, and put their objects and memories in these cylindrical boxes that are shaped like sculptures and can be freely combined, and the user will establish a connection with these boxes and "their own trees". In the end, he can give the boxes and the stories they contain to another person. "Again; A collection "is like a tree, an object that grows over time, acting as a storage space for users' memories and stories to ensure the safety of their most precious items."
Designer Clémence Buytaert started her work from a time perspective. She believes that the definition of "slow design" means spending time, reducing waste, producing higher quality products, and finding some kind of balance between the society and the environment in which we live. "What is the metaphorical object that best represents the slow and time-consuming part?" Buttart asked herself how to finally find the rocking chair, which is the ideal embodiment of what she sees as "slow design": the rocking chair moves back and forth to encourage people to remain aware during the activity; The "rocking chair" is a kind of furniture item, which has traditionally been passed down from generation to generation. She made the "Rocking Chair" out of American red oak, and the whole rocking chair is thoughtfully designed to give it a hand-built feel, but it can also be flattened with practicality and reducing the carbon footprint of the transportation process.

Designer Maximilian Beck's exploration of "slowness" brought him to the cobblestone object and the history behind it. Baker's work, named after the German cobblestone "Kies", incorporates all four woods into the creation, thus presenting the diversity of cobblestones and the rich history. Baker began the design process by studying the natural formation of pebbles. Over the years, stone deposits from the mountains, departing from glaciers, transported through rivers and finally reaching the ocean. This process slowly erodes the rough surface of the stones, and over the centuries of "migration" history, they eventually acquire a smooth appearance, evenly distributed organic shape, and become pebbles. For Baker, the process is the embodiment of the purpose of the slow project.

"I love working with wood, especially the traditional methods of making wooden joints." In his work, Baker tries to use traditional fabrication methods as much as possible, even though they can mean longer and more difficult work. His "Kies" table and stool series consists of piles of "pebbles" of varying sizes, with smooth edges and neutral colors that bring a sense of calm, like some kind of intentional slowdown, a visual feature that contrasts with today's fast-paced world. This visual feature contrasts with today's fast-paced world and gives a new dimension to the concept of "slow furniture".

Anna Koppmann's The (UN)Ordinary Chair connects slow design with "beauty". Trying to challenge the definition of beauty in design, Koppmann asks, "Is beauty only a matter of appearance, or is there more to it than meets the eye?" Inspired by designers Naoto Fukasawa and Jasper Morrison's book Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary, Koppelman designed a chair that looks ordinary. With its classic form and innovative use of materials, she describes the chair as "a flirtation with the archetypal chair," using the apparently ordinary chair to draw attention to a more important issue than "aesthetic beauty": how to support sustainable forestry systems.

American cherry, maple and red oak were all used in the design. Red oak was used for the bent parts, including the seat and back; maple, which is inherently solid and suitable for weight-bearing, was used for the legs; and cherry, with its beautiful grain, was used to shape the seat structure in the first chair and as a vignette on the back of the second. Until now, the use of a combination of different types of wood in a single piece of furniture has remained uncommon in terms of the way it was designed. In Koppmann's view, this push for "single woods" is often a matter of taste. In the long run, if people continue to select raw materials from the forest in a selective manner, the forest system is unlikely to remain healthy and adaptable to the changing climate. This "(Un)ordinary chair" makes the combination of wood visually and materially appealing to people's living spaces, while at the same time contributing to the sustainable use of forest resources through its diversity of materials.

Sarah Hossli and Lorenz Noelle's Forest takes the ecosystem of the forest as an object of study, beginning with a study of interactive forest maps generated by the U.S. Hardwood Export Council. These maps visually depict the amount, growth, and consumption of hardwood forests in the U.S. These naturally occurring forests are large and diverse, with cherry, maple, and red oak accounting for 40 percent of the total, and are growing much faster than they are being used. The "forest" takes four types of wood and uses data from the interactive forest map as the basic "source material". Wood inventory, wood removal, and forestry sustainability were translated into bowls, with the final product being a collection of nine bowls. All the bowls are identical in shape but different in size, with different numbers for different regions and wood types, and visitors can easily read this data through this work. But the designer also wanted people to feel the value of the wood itself in the bowls, which are arranged in the shape of the distribution of trees in the forest, simulating a symbolic forest. Project mentor Hanne Willmann sees the work as a good example of the depth of the wood theme, saying, "As a designer, I should ask myself more often, would I choose wood for my work? And if so, what kind of wood am I going to use? These questions help deepen the designer's sense of a particular wood.

Simon Gehring's "Leftover Synthesis" explores how to make better use of wood chips and waste wood from furniture production. Gehring questions the notion of "sustainable" wood, saying, "If you look deeper into them, you find that generally speaking, wood doesn't mean sustainable." He believes that today's trends in design consumption suggest that we should make fuller use of our existing resources, and by joining the Slow project, he has come up with the idea of using "already used wood". In other words, he used the waste generated throughout the project studio to make his work. From other participants, he collected a large amount of wood chips and waste wood to make his three chairs called "Residuals Synthesis". In the studio, other designers often come to him with leftover wood, sometimes saying, "These are the legs of your table."
In contrast to Anna Koopman's seemingly unusual chairs, Green's chairs are nothing like traditional chairs, which are made up of many single, smaller parts. With the help of algorithms, Greene processes the wood as minimally as possible; leftover wood below a certain size is usually sorted, burned or chopped, with most of the wood retaining their individual shapes. By using algorithms that adapt to different shapes and sizes, he arranges the leftover wood precisely, like building blocks, to create furniture forms that give wood a second life as functional objects. The variable size and number of parts used in the "Surplus Synthesis Chair" means that each chair ends up assembled in a different way and with a unique finish.
Design studio Haus Otto's "Endless Garden" is also made of red oak and explores modularity as a focus. "A modular storage system that can serve as a bookshelf or other functional shelf, Endless Garden emphasizes the meaning of "slow" in an increasingly fast world and addresses the ideas of longevity, sustainability and deceleration.

The two members of Otto's House, Niels Körner and Patrick Henry Nagel, are both from villages in southern Germany. After joining the "Slow" project, they returned to the Black Forest to see the natural aesthetics of the forest. Compared to today's big cities, which are characterized by industry and speed, rural areas evoke images of "slowing down" and "tradition" more easily. They found the familiar fence from childhood as an entry point for their work. While fences are often used as a romanticized symbol of home ownership, Otto's House offers a new interpretation of fences in a playful way. While a fence usually means "to live somewhere," the fence in "Endless Garden" takes a piece of the traditional fence and "grows" horizontally or vertically to accommodate the spatial changes of modern life. It emphasizes horizontal structure and creates an impression of infinity through interlocking connecting elements. The fences of Otto's House are objects of variable dimensions that, through repeated reconfigurations, create new spatial structures and redefine human living space. "We painted the surface of the wood and you can see the year of growth of the material. It's an element we like, and usually this wood is outdoors. Over time, you can see this naturally." The designer said.

According to Sebastian Herkner, mentor of the "Slow" project, the wood designs of the participating designers are a reminder to people living in a fast-paced era that part of what "slow" means is "patience. Herkner said many people forget how to stay patient and that a tree needs time to grow. "A tree is not like a product you buy online that you order today and arrives at your doorstep first thing the next morning. The tree already has its own story before it becomes a commodity, and you read those stories in the wood grain." When consuming design products made from wood, consumers need to realize that these workshops produce high quality items that take time, require manpower, and are backed by experience, knowledge and passion. Heckner sees these qualities in these nine groups of designers' "slow" designs.

Article Source:艺术与设计

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