cultural time and tempos
Time is often seen to have a universal approach and order of functioning. However, it can be seen as varying from city to city and culture to culture. Through our research and readings, we were able to delve into understanding these differences and distinguish time being linear or cyclical in nature.
Western cultures tend to view time as linear, with a definitive beginning and end. Time is viewed as limited in supply, so Western people structure their lives, especially business operations, by milestones and deadlines... Other cultures perceive time as cyclical and endless. (http://www.exactlywhatistime.com/other-aspects-of-time/time-in-different-cultures/)
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Research shows that cultural differences in time can be as vast as those between languages. Half a century ago anthropologist Edward Hall described cultural rules of social time as the “silent language” (Hall, 1983). These informal patterns of time “are seldom, if ever, made explicit. They exist in the air around us. They are either familiar and comfortable or unfamiliar and wrong.”
UNDERSTANDING CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN TIME
Time in cultures goes beyond the measuring of time by a chart or table showing days and months of a particular year, and can be seen as a system of cultural preferences towards the past, present, and future. To further understand these cultural differences in time we looked at various cultural calendars as seen below.
Each of these calendars followed a cyclical or linear framework. These calendars go beyond just looking at a day or month of a particular year and have a layered and intricate system of organisation. Apart from clock time, event and nature time are also given great importance with astrological influences.
Exploring different cultural calendars
BRAINSTORMING CULTURAL TEMPOS
Cultural calendars and values are seen as one of the determinants of measuring the pace of life from place to place. In a quantitative approach, the pace of life can also be measured by population, degree of industrialisation, and economic well-being.
The role of cultural tempos and temporal signatures of a place, although qualitative in approach has its own influences in a micro and macro scale on the pace of life.
Our next step was brainstorming the idea of cultural tempos and we created a mind map with categories of information of initial thoughts and questions.
The brainstorming process got us to explore sensory signatures like the smell of the food, smell of the roads, the smell of the air, the sounds of language; textural tempos like the feel of the roads, kinds of architecture; and the idea of the multitemporal, and how they are relational. Robert Levine's book highlighted the importance of personal experiences and stories that enrich thoughts, concepts and understanding. We wanted to bring this to our project by asking and capturing people's experiences and stories of creating their pace of life and tempos after having moved to London.
CULTURAL STORYTELLING
We decided to gather a few participants and have a discussion of the differences they felt either in their surroundings and environment or their behavioural changes from when they were in their home city to after having moved to London. We prepared questions in 4 categories: travel, meals, work, and school for this discussion.
There were participants from 7 cultures being Polish, Russian, Lebanese, French, Malagasy, Spanish, and Indian. Storytelling as a method of research was a great approach as we were able to understand the personal, the interpersonal, relations, and emotions. The participants were eager to tell their stories and engage in discussions with the entire group as well.
We created a transcript of the entire discussion and began our analysis, highlighting the temporal signatures and changes that they mentioned.
Themes of routines, planning, easing into and out of gaps, and rhythms emerged from the transcript analysis. With these initial themes, we were able to form a preliminary research question being, 'How do we soften the gap felt by students that move to a foreign place with a different cultural tempo?'
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Few screenshots of our transcript analysis
Our project started taking shape with our research, brainstorming, and talking to people. Our next step was to start ideating what form this would take and think about ways we could ease this temporal gap. The idea of different paces of life is complex and subjective. We had difficulty in finding a way to be able to create a design that would have a universal approach. The storytelling was a great way to gather information and understand different approaches of people. We decided to build on this and try to take it to a further level.