‘If only I had a little more time…’ was the starting point for my final major project proposal. The COVID-19 pandemic created a universal shift, a new normal, leading to severe uncertainty in the daily functioning and passage of time. The normalcy of busyness and linearity is so deeply ingrained in people’s lives that any shift or change is seen to affect mental health, productivity, emotions, and senses. The pandemic also led to a new way for people to manage or deal with time which became another area of inquiry and interest. I wanted to explore the notions of time, the feelings of monotony, and people’s routines. Einsteins theory of special relativity states, “Time slows down or speeds up depending on how fast you move in relation to something else”
This led to me questioning: Does a structured nature of living lead to stability or does it impact the idea of creative living?
​
During the Micro UX project, I realised the similarities between Ana and my interests and we decided to collaborate together for our FMP. We quickly started our initial brainstorming where Ana started looking at the idea of a calendar and the sameness of it worldwide. We started questioning what would happen if we were to change the 24 hour time structure to 23 or 25 hours? How would people react? How would they manage their times and routines?
We had a very broad range of interests and inquiries and created a timeline to help us plan and understand our way forward.
Process timeline made by Ana and me
INITIAL REFERENCES
In order to help us set some boundaries and directions, we started researching projects, artists, and technologies that worked with different concepts of time.
Circa Solar is an app that works to living in harmony with nature. It helps to realign and harmonise our lives with the same daily rhythms and seasonal cycles of nature dictated by the entrainment cues of sunlight. (http://circa.solar/)
Images were taken from http://circa.solar/
#TransActing: A market of Values was a pop-up exhibition organised by Critical Practice that explored existing structures of evaluation and actively produced new ones. This pop-up had multiple currencies not all of them monetary which made us think about time as a currency. (https://www.criticalpracticechelsea.org/wiki/index.php/TransActing:_A_Market_of_Values)
Image taken from http://www.criticalpracticechelsea.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
The Yakama Time ball was another inspiration where the women from the Yakama Native American tribe used strings of hemp as personal diaries. Each major event in their life was represented by a knot, a bead, or a shell. This mnemonic device is called an Ititamat, or counting-the-days ball, or simply time ball which goes beyond the 1920s. (http://dataphys.org/list/yakama-time-ball/)
Images were taken from http://dataphys.org/list/yakama-time-ball/
WAY FORWARD
We received positive encouragement from John, Al, and our classmates. Identifying our target audience, looking at categorisation of information, being able to define what we mean by certain terms like monotony, and researching circadian rhythms, chronobiology, and rhythms of routines were some of their insights. Looking at these areas of research and trying to narrow down our areas of inquiry was our next step for the way forward.
introduction