Time travel | Concept | Brief | Ideas | Theory | Prototype |

Theory

A fundamental problem in traditional schedulers, on paper or in digital form is its rigidness to one time scale. It is either given, or you can define it yourself, but either way, you are always observing things in this frame of reference, that prevents seeing detail and overview together. If viewing an overview, detailed infromation cannot be shown, because it simply would not fit to the space. On the other hand, if viewing schedule on a daily scale, relating events to the future or past becomes harder.

For instance, in booking time intensive work project, it is useful to be able to see the bigger picture, how do the holidays or more quiet periods fit to the whole but also look at individual entries in one's schedule to map, say, time of day. An overview and detail comes even more important if the scheduling is to deal with group of people, when individuals do not necessarily know the comings and goings of others much in detail.

An attempt is to create an engaging way of presenting scheduling information in a public space for a group of people. The system is to be very easy to use, combining an aesthetic experience to the information content.

By using the capacity of human mind to decode cues of 3 dimensional space, the awareness of the connections between near time and far time can be bridged together. If the visual cues of far and near are translated into far and near in space, and tranversing in this information space is similar to moving in real space, the complexity of the data is shifted from symbolic level to perceptional.

A nice allegory would be to contrast the situation to having hardware accelerated graphics cards, that take the strain off the CPU.