A Change of Pace: Re-Thinking Tempo While Designing for Living

By Bethany Martin

A cultural obsession with speed, driven by the modern marketplace, has us producing and consuming at an ever increasing rate. As the pace of our daily lives accelerates with the speed of our technologies, we are moving too fast to engage in the more subtle experiences of time. Upon beginning this project, one of the first questions I asked was: “what is the world in which I want to live?” This thesis explores a paradigm shift from mainstream “fast design” towards engaging a more holistic, more sustainable, and less consumptive experience of the everyday. Knowing when to be fast and when to be slow might better enable us to deal with the complex problems we face in the world today. My designs seek to mediate our cultural addiction to speed through the creation of pockets of slowness to the benefit of ourselves, our communities and our planet.

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