Ethnography, co-design and emergence: Slow activism for sustainable design

In this article I take the novel step of examining how ethnographic understandings of the futures and intervention orientation of indirect forms of activism can inform design practice. To do this I focus on the example of the Slow City movement, specifically on its development across the UK, Spain and Australia. The focus on process and relationality that is part of the way that the movement works, creates forms of emergence that can lead to sustainability and resilience. Such processes are in many ways coherent with the principles of design anthropology and a phenomenological approach to co-design, and I suggest that by studying the success and limitations of Slow City examples we can see their work as a kind of living lab that brings new insights to design theory and practice for similar or parallel scenarios.