‘Living’

A Future of Living series

The way we live is becoming defined by two (on the face of it) simple ideas — Fast and Slow. The tensions between them sit at the heart of our appetite for faster and ever slicker services alongside a growing belief in more meaningful ways of living. ‘Living’ is a big, catch-all term but this idea of fast/slow relates to everything that touches our homes, neighbourhoods and beyond. From digital-first retail and the logistics that make it work, all the way to spaces, furnishings and devices in the home.

These two qualities are already shaping the services, products and experiences we will want and need in the decade ahead. Where fast is connected, smart, frictionless and global; slow is in-the-moment, contained, considered and local — and while they seem contradictory at first, we at NewTerritory feel that future experiences are going to be defined by clever blends of them both.

Using these ideas helps us look again at the home and ways to design for it more sensitively. With homes as spaces which now need to flex even more between work, rest and play — as places that we want to be both intimately private and globally public — we need different ideas of what consumer products look and feel like. What new functionalities they might have that are different to today, how we interact with them, what materials they are made of, how they sit within the bigger context of our complicated home environments, how they stand out or sit back and blend in, and so on. We think that there’s such huge opportunity to design for the home in ways that are far richer than the ‘physical apps’ of so many current devices and appliances, ways that are much more about context, meaning and joy.

Fast and Slow are ideas that NewTerritory are using to create new services and experiences for the home and neighbourhood, as well as new product typologies, forms and interactions that are as fast (or faster) than ever, but that speak to a different, emerging set of slower values.

Author: Hugo Jamson, Creative Director at NewTerritory.