Back in 2006, designer’s designer Ezio Manzini (of the Politecnico di Milano) and Giacomo Mojoli of the Slow Food movement, proposed a very important seminar, which as far as I’m concerned, should be considered a landmark event for the different streams of thought and practice that it brought together. Because the ideas are still so pertinent, I’m reproducing parts of the brochure.

The seminar is based on the success of the Slow Food movement, which is not just a way of eating, but above all a new production model:

1. First strand: The slow production model

“the slow approach means the simple, but in current times revolutionary, affirmation
that it is not possible to produce and appreciate quality if we do not allow ourselves the time to
do so, in other words, if we do not activate some kind of slowdown. However, slow does not only
mean this. It also means a concrete way of actually putting this idea into practice. It means
cultivating quality: linking products and their producers to their places of production and to their
end-users who, by taking part in the production chain in different ways, become themselves coproducers.

So, the slow approach outlines a new production and consumption model that is at the same time
both subversive and feasible. While clashing head on with the ideas and practices of today’s
prevailing globalisation, it can be enacted locally both immediately and, as Slow Food has
proved, successfully.

2. Second strand: designing for sustainability

“we can observe that a “new design” is emerging: a design that adopts a systemic view, that looks at the complexities of social networks, develops a capacity for listening and interrelates with the creativity and diffuse entrepreneurship that characterize contemporary society. In so doing it becomes an active part of the transformation processes underway and in those that must take place, confronted as we are with the enormous issues at stake.

This second line of evolution is, in our opinion, what lends design a potentially strategic role in
the definition of new ideas of well-being and of ways to achieve it.”

3. Bringing slow production and sustainable design together

The joining of the two leads to to three important questions:

1) The enhancement of local resources and a distributed economy. The Slow Model is a cultural model for an economy based on the sustainable enhancement of local resources in conjunction with product, social and environmental quality. What is the relationship between the Slow Model and the proposal for a society based on some form of distributed economy? What can design do
to foster these processes?

2) The transparency of production systems and de-intermediation. The Slow model promotes the identity of food products, the visibility of transformation and distribution, and the enabling of consumer-users to recognise (and demand) quality. What is the relationship between the Slow Model and emerging forms of direct interaction between producers and consumers (e.g. ethical
purchasing groups)? What possibility is there of linking these to the new forms of peer-to-peer
organisation that internet makes possible?

3) Product experience and sensoriality. The Slow Model, when applied to food, can be summarised in the following expression: good to eat and good to think. In fact it promotes the sensorial quality of products (and the quality of the experience arising from their use and consumption)
inseparably intertwining this with the social and environmental quality of the places and
processes of production. To what extent can this way of doing things be exported from food to
other fields of production and consumption? What is the relationship between the Slow Model
and the issue of design for experience, so much talked about within the design community in the
past?

4. How all this relates to a new distributed economy?

“After focusing attention on producer communities for many years, Slow Food has recently started to widen its field of interest to food communities: i.e. communities that include and directly
connect producers with consumers, or rather “co-producers”.

This happy piece of intuition can be linked to wider phenomena: the emergence of models of
diffuse design by which groups of people, creative communities, invent new modes of being and
doing. We can mention as typical examples: ethical purchasing groups, the new farmer markets
in cities, or community based agricultural ventures. These are certainly widely differing activities,
but with significant characteristics in common in terms of the reasons for their existence and the
cultural and economic contexts in which they started: the search for new visibility in production,
transformation and distribution processes and a growing user-capacity to recognise quality, to
demand it in different forms and to intervene in its creation. In this way, to all intents and
purposes, they become real co-producers of the quality generated.

In turn, all this can be linked to the diffusion of network systems in which it finds a possible
driver and facilitator. The success of the internet, in particular, has boosted the diffusion of new
organisational models where the web does not only serve as technical support infrastructure but
also as a powerful organisational metaphor: a vision from which organisational models have been
imagined and set up that break with the traditional, vertical hierarchies and generate horizontal,
de-intermediated solutions based on “peer-to-peer” relationships. In short, organisational models
that lead us to radically redesign many consolidated ways of doing things.

On this new ground, the Slow Food idea of building food networks based on new food
communities is undoubtedly one of the most mature and solid proposals. However, it implies
profound systemic changes that redefine actor roles, change product logistics and transform the
economies the systems are based on. Obviously all this has required, and still requires,
considerable design capacity: a design capacity that the design community calls system design
and service design.”

5. Special contribution by Peter Kisch of the Distributed Economies Laboratories

“Localisation has (as a response to global economy) been gaining increasing interest.

Therefore ideas such as “Think Local First” and “ 10 Reasons to Think Local” are emerging.
This is however not enough. We are not profiting from the true potential of starting small and
local. What is missing is “connectedness”, i.e. to link up small local initiatives in a functioning
web/ network.

It is about unleashing the true potential of local economies (and individuals) by not only “think
global, act local” but also “think locally, act global”. There is need to promote a new mindset of
development (in particular industrial development), which is based on diversity, quality and
connectivity instead of only more efficiency, homogeneity, centralisation and economies of scale.
It is about expanding the mental idea of the World Wide Web into new sectors and domains.
The productive point of focus to catalyse this shift should be on being distributed and connected,
where tangible resource flows remain dominantly local and it is design and knowledge that
travels. Here, production, global access and connections are driven by, and primarily designed
from, the point of view of small-scale local units and not that of large scale global actors.
Imagine a world where design travels and production stays local, closer to consumers… where
home PCs are also used for production of products and artefacts… a world where the need for
global logistics systems is drastically reduced… Welcome to the world of Distributed
Economies.”

6. Carlo Bogliotti on the experience with Food networks

“In the language of Slow Food, de-intermediation and transparency in production systems
means “shortening the food chain”.

During the movement’s twenty year long experience there have been many experiments that, though with widely differing aims, have all in some way outlined new possibilities of bringing producers and consumers (or rather, “co-producers) both physically and culturally closer together. They are original Slow Food experiences, such as the Presidia, school vegetable gardens and farmers’ markets, or Terra Madre: an international event that for the first time brings together more than a thousand so-called “food communities”. However, we also talk about the interception of other successful experiments through the Slow Food network, such as, “Farmers’ Markets“, “Community Supported Agriculture” and “Ethical Purchasing Groups”.

The need to rethink production, distribution and consumption systems for food and to return to
the multi-localism essential to guaranteeing a “good, clean and ethical” quality to food, has led
Slow Food not only to theorise but also to “think and do”.

Such experiences are constantly evolving, being redesigned and created. An excursus through what has already been done and what we intend to do will shed light on new organisational models that valorise local resources, bring about a “different”, distributed, economy and, more than anything else, break down the barriers between people who produce and those who make use of this production, barriers that have grown with the ongoing industrialisation of agro-food production processes.

All these experiences have a “philosophical” lowest common denominator: respect and enhancement of diversity and its networking.

In this idea of a new worldwide food network and new ways of linking different knots in the network, lies a global project that is extendible to other application fields. Since it is by its very nature (and designed after nature) constantly adapting, it needs contributions from various other application fields such as information technology, service design, logistics etc.”