Field Notes From the Beaten Path: Place, Tempo and Design

Vse ima svojo uro, vsako veselje ima svoj čas pod nebom.

Everything on earth has its own time and its own season.

—Slovenian biblical proverb

Last October, I took a solo trip through the Northern landscapes of Slovenia — seeking a change of pace. On my walks across Ljubljana and its surrounding Alpine region, I encountered several interesting conversationalists, the most memorable of whom was a waiter at an empty lakefront restaurant in Bled. We discussed the contrast between our individual lives — his in a Slovenian locale reminiscent of a quiet Impressionism, mine in the insurmountable bustle of London’s chewing gum-riddled streets. What emerged during our exchange was something deeper than personal stories: the idea of place and tempo as design. The most striking difference between mine and the waiter’s respective places lies not only in geography, architecture, and population — but in tempo. Boarding a plane to Slovenia, I didn’t simply mean to escape London — I meant to escape its tempo. I needed to substitute a faster tempo for a slower one because a slow tempo lets me breathe and helps me think. Reading the late American designer Victor Papanek’s 1970s title Design for the Real World, I’ve lately been drawn to understand place as design and the design of place as based upon a set of affordances, or modalities of interacting with our topography. I find this Papanek excerpt especially pertinent to my thoughts:

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‘All men are designers. All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity. The planning and patterning of any act towards a desired, foreseeable end constitutes the design process. Any attempt to separate design, to make it a thing-by-itself, works counter to the fact that design is the primary underlying matrix of life.’

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If design sustains all human activity, shaping a sense of place is quintessential. The immaterial features of a place — like tempo — become immaterial features of those who inhabit it. People and place are fluid, inseparable. In light of this idea, the tempo of a place might be understood as a kind of spatial logic that dictates the underlying design system, within which we can access different planes or potentialities of ourselves. For example, London’s design system is built upon getting things done, superficial graces, and means-to-an-end clock time. Emails, tube queues, and overcrowding force a reactive self. In opposition, Slovenia’s design system is attuned to the present moment, taking it all in, and stretched-out time where metrics of minutes, hours or days are unimportant, or irrelevant. Streams leading from place to place, fresh-picked plums, and mists that gather and break over the Alpine peaks instead invite a relational self. People are at once a product of place, and continually shaped by it. Returning to London, I couldn’t possibly hold the same perspective that I did before I met with Slovenia. I designed my own experience in Slovenia and Slovenia has in turn designed me. Perhaps, with all the malaise of our collective ecology, these are the layers we need to not only pay focused attention, but practice in our design thinking mindsets day-to-day. If place can affect us so profoundly, why aren’t we taking greater care in how we consider its future development? Maybe that’s a conversation for next October, if I meet my waiter friend again.