Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed (01 Oct 2004) It's true that there have always been people calling attention to the damaging effects of speed. But it seems to me that we've reached a kind of breaking point now, that things have gotten so fast that they're taking such a toll on not only our health but our ability to enjoy things. It seems to me that we're so hurried and so hectic that we've almost lost the art of just being in the moment and taking real pleasure from things. We're so busy trying to get things finished so we can keep multitasking. We're kind of just whizzing through our lives instead of living them. And now, if you go across the industrial world, you'll really find a very strong groundswell against that. People are slowing down in all walks of life. I've been traveling around and writing about it and hearing back from people, and there's a real sense of a slow movement in its early stages and [it's now] reaching critical mass. Article URL: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/oct04/1004book.html Read 63 more articles from IEEE Spectrum sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Server side usability     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy