Slow Ways of Knowing is a project series by slowLab that encourages new ways of 'knowing' urban places and understanding the physical, social and cultural phenomena they stimulate.

The first project in the series, at left, was created in 2006 for the city of Bristol, England as it celebrated the 200th birth year of Isambard K. Brunel, a man who pioneered several key engineering feats of the industrial revolution, some of them in Bristol. 'Slow Ways of Knowing: Bristol' was designed as a series of encounters with Brunel-era artifacts and the surrounding natural landscape to evoke responses and actions from participants. Walking a historic trail along the city's Western Docklands, they were invited to connect with the histories and patterns that the site reveals through their own empirical observation, sensory awareness and intuitive imagining.

For another project in the series, slowLab is collaborating in 2008 with photographer Leslie Grant on ‘Slow Ways of Knowing: Domino,’  a documentary project that explores a complex and layered human dimension of the Domino Sugar Refinery building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the sole remaining physical artifact of what was once a thriving industrial center along New York's waterfront. slowLab will publish the results of this project both online and in book form, including neighborhood maps linked to specific images and stories of the project. While public dialogues will address the broader conflicts and opportunities of industrial redevelopment that the project illuminates.

By revealing unseen or forgotten aspects of those places, Slow Ways of Knowing projects strive to generate awareness and participation, to remind people of their own part in and responsibility to the life of such places, and to encourage ongoing creative investigations. Only then is it possible to envision and, importantly to affect what they may become in the future.