O & E: Slow, Slower, and Slowest

Permalink 06/22/05  

Summer is going strong here in Chicago, and that means that everybody's slowing down. Since today is definitely an Odds and Ends day, we thought that a little gathering of slowness was in order. Maybe looking at these timescales so different from our own will inspire you to explore one in your next design.
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Our first stop on this tour of slow is actually pretty fast. These videos are taken with ultra-high speed film or digital imagers, so that even the speediest bits -- flys flying, bullets whizzing, and golf balls wiggling -- are slowed to a crawl. Photron makes super-high-speed cameras, and their videos show everything from fuel injection to crashing race cars in super slowness. Redlake is also a high speed camera maker, with a slightly more varied gallery of videos. The images of the diver and mantis shrimp are amazing.

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Moving on to something a little slower, Plants In Motion is a great site for time-lapse-style video of germination, growth, and flower opening of plants. Behaviors like "dancing" in order to find better light, and gravitropism to orient root and shoot growth are really well illustrated.


Finally, for some super-duper-slowness, how about the movement of tectonic plates? This animation of the movement of the continental shelves from Pangaea to our current configuration takes 150 million years to complete. Or, these tiny gifs give little glimpses of how volcanoes, earthquakes, plate shifting, and siltification add up to our present continents. A whole page of interactive animations is available here.

Obviously your next toaster doesn't need continental drift to be successful. But maybe there is something about ultra-slow change that could allow products a longer usable life? Or a longer "cool" life? What if fashion changed slowly over the life of the product, and the longer you had it, the more it changed from it's original form? Maybe that's a way to combat the gotta-have-new-throwaway blues.

Whatever you decide on, take our advice, and slow down every once in a while.
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Copyright 2004-2006 Dominic Muren and IDFuel Team




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