intro

The flow of time is anything but constant, for every individual, every organism.

the lapse project looks at our preception of time, providing tools for reflection and understanding of one's own, personal flow of time.

The proposals are conceptual tools, not bound too tightly to any product per se. It is hopefully relatively evident, though, how they might be situated in home environment or on the move.

.Glance - a clock that measures the frequency at which it is being looked at. By displaying an overview of the rate at which one checks the time is a good indicator of how the time seems to pass.

100.001 - Lifetime - is a clock that ticks every one thousandth of the owner's lifetime. It reflects the change in perception over long time. A year for a child is an aeon, whereas for a pensionist it may seem much shorter.

VideoClock - uses a cross-section of time from a video feed to "paint" a traditional clockface. One can simulataneously see the second, minute and hour scale of events that have taken place in fron of it.

Interaction Design, pressure project 04/02/02
Rory Hamilton and Dominic Robson

"Hurry, hurry! So much time, so little to do!" Willy Wonka

This simple brief is to look at the nature of clocks and other time measuring devices. how do we use them? Why do we use them? Waht is their meaning?

Restyling of clocks are numerous: but we ask you not to restyle but to rethink. not reskin existing clocks but to come up with a completely new way of looking at time.

Your design should be beautiful, engaging, and work. Whatever medium you choose we should all be able to understand and use your system.

The time in between.

The flow of time is anything but constant, no matter from which perspective you look at it.
Rescent article in the new scientist describes different states of consciousness as bodily function. How we are aware of our environment and ourselves differently depending on the brain state. This reflects directly into the way we experience time.
Animals having different metabolic rate function at different "wavelengths". A blue whale’s heart only two or three times a minute, where a mouse’s about 700, which does make a difference in the way the creatures perceive the world.
What we see as a moment, can be an aeon for some. Einstein’s relativity put a whole new perspective in to the equation suggesting that even the measurement of time is observer dependent, the ultimate relative time.
We, however, measure and track time mostly in absolute terms. Clocks tick according to the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.
Time runs slow when we are bored, and flies when asleep or excited. Regardless of the experience, though, we have to adjust our daily lives to the absolute measure. This is more than societal necessity, as the daily cycle also controls to great deal our biology.

Absolute time ticks on with total certainty. It is now and here. In traditional displays and measures of time, there is little reflection, little dialogue with the past or the future. It is a point on a scale. Though you see the scale, it is neutral and lacking any qualitative information about what happened or what might happen.
Lapse attempts to provide an alternative view on our perception of time. Rather than displaying the exact time in terms of numbers or relation to some other absolute measure, it reflects the present only to the previous time it was looked at. This information is built into a segment of history, where one can see, when the time has been queried. And since these relations are displayed so that they reveal their temporal distance from one another, one can see when the time has been flowing slow to the viewer/viewers. It situates people on their personal pace rather than that of the surroundings.
When waiting for something important, time crawls very slowly, this is often when you keep on glancing at the clock. On the other hand, when you are in a state of concentration, time flies, and you forget to even look at the clock for hours.

Glance records the times when you have a look at the clock, and displays it in a timeline or on a clockface with a colour gradient. Depending on the daily rythm, one can reflect how fast/slow time has passed that day.

It attempts to bring bit more visible the tension one can easily feel but not realise. Also, it provides with an overview on the deeds of the day, perhaps laying out markers of important events that one can situate appropriately when recalled afterwards.

Shockwave prototypes:
concept 1 (9 kb)
concept 2 (26 kb)
user scenario (269 kb)

A time strip of an ordinary weekday, waking at about seven, lunch at noon and getting restless to go home before five...

100.001 beats every one thousandth of your lifetime. The older you get the less frequent the beats. The clock, however, shows real time. In the beginning milliseconds, then seconds, and in later years minutes.

The clock reflects the change in our perception of time. Suggesting a change in our "sampling rate" of the world. Slowing down it stretches our perception on time to the past and future, keeping the present constant.

It is hard to imagine one single clock that would preserve throughout one's lifetime, and hence 100.001 is suggested as a function for a range of clocks and watches rather than any individual object.

Shockwave:
100.001 scenario

Coming soon...

Though the concept of time is probably one of those the most thought and explored, I feel that within this one week, I did manage to capture some interesting avenues and turn them into functional prototypes.

Also, binding the Lightspeed project into this context it seemed to make much sense, going beyond what the initial aim of it was.

Further, we are producing the timeclocks in larger format printouts, capturing one 12 hour cycle in time.