DAMNº #79

DAMNº 79 - Take Your Time

Speed has become the measure of success and fast is never fast enough.

Now, urgent, instant.

Fast news, fast networks, fast fashion. Being efficient, being productive no longer feels like a decision, but the only available option. Being competitive is essential to survival.

In Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times efficiency is measured by the maximisation of rapid production through the progamming of human behaviour. As mechanical gives way to digital, we struggle to keep up, always falling further and further behind.

Stress and anxiety mount as we become more enslaved to technology.

And it’s not just in big business, in culture too.

Algorithms, fungible bits, virtual screening rooms.

But the world at this speed is unsustainable. Speed distorts out values, repressing what needs to be re-cultivated – sustainability, community, cooperation, generosity, patience, subtlety, deliberation, reflection, and slowness.

DAMNº 79 will delve into designers and artists working with, analysing, celebrating and critically denouncing this contemporary obsession with time. It will look to those forcing an alternative, insisting on how time's gone must be reconsidered to ensure that time’s coming has a decent chance of being so much more about fairness to each other and the environment.

DAMNº is an independent publication with open-minded views on the interchangeable worlds of design, architecture and art. In making meaningful connections rather than dictating tastes, its approach to storytelling brings editorial content beyond hype or conventional academic debate. Unafraid to link the personal and the political, the economic and the emotional, the stylistic and the social, DAMN° is ultimately about discoveries that aim to provoke a reaction…whether it be a thought or a smile.