In 2018 I spent six months at my grandmother’s farm in Estonia. Mateo and I were still at the agency then, or technically I was on leave from it. Forty websites a year had begun to feel like the same website forty times.
The neighbouring field was empty. I asked about it often enough that my grandmother eventually explained, with some patience, that it was left fallow every third year. It wasn’t abandoned. It was part of the work.
That was the useful distinction. Rest could belong inside a process rather than being something you earned by finishing it. We had been treating thought as a delay between a brief and a design.
We started Slow Field Studio in 2019. We borrowed a name and a principle, not an agricultural qualification. We are still learning what to leave alone.