In defense of slow design
Yesterday, I discovered an essay called “Slow Design,” written by Callie Neylan, by way of the Phoenix Designers Group on Facebook. A few minutes later, the hum of the neighborhood from my back patio dimmed, the streets went quiet, the wind lulled to a breath. A quote from Callie’s manifesto for a return to slow, deliberate, mindful design:
May suitable doses of guaranteed visual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment resulting from a slowly-designed, well-designed thing preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.
Unequivocally, it’s a beautiful post whose words and intent are the ice from a stiff drink melting on your tongue after a long day. ”The multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.” I wish that phrase had been my own.
More on point, I applaud this writer’s passion for craft. Far too often, craftsmanship is sacrificed for speed, greatness traded for agility. Design thrives on constraints, but time should not consistently be the most pressing among them. On countless occasions have I longed for the chance to mull—to let an idea swirl around in my mouth before having to be spat out as a complete thought. The rare times when a design has indeed crawled rather than sprinted, the work has been a glass of fine wine enjoyed in an ocean breeze. It’s been work with staying power.
But pitted against designers, always and forever, are the biggest challengers to the notion of slow design: budgets and board members, all of which suffer from impatience. And though many successful designers embrace these challenges and even tout their value, I can’t help but wonder what they could become given the luxury of a full lung’s worth of air in a project timeline to consider the experience of its outcome.
While writers are frequently capable of finishing a piece in mere hours, it can sometimes take years when writing something of significance to string all the right words together into all the right sentences. Alas, while the most important writing in our history has been the result of a great number of revisions, designers are expected to reveal their drafts.
While newsroom journalists can crank out piece after piece, it is those who invest mighty spans of time on a single idea that are best able to unearth the soul of a work—to make the invisible visible. As designers, we most often act as newsroom journalists. Are we not also aspiring Pulitzer Prize-winning authors?
Since when can a user’s experience be considered in mere hours?
