While in Milan, for Milan Design Week, I came up with the
idea of a watch that shows its own age.
My initial idea was to design a watch face with raised numbers made of
sandstone. As the hands of the watch
wound down, they would wear down the sandstone numbers. When you are young, time is so important to
you – you clock-watch, count down the minutes and often wish your time
away. As you get older, the exact time
becomes less important to you and you begin to appreciate where you have
been. This was the ethos behind the
wind-down watch; as the watch ages, the time becomes less easy to read and
eventually all you have left is the loose sand from where the numbers once
were.
 |
| Chrono-Shredder - Susanna Hertrich: Source |
In his essay on products and their relationship to time,
Stuart Walker hypothesises that time has two distinct progressions; secular
time and sacred time. (van Hinte, 2004)
Secular time relates to the everyday life of a person, it is linear and
fleeting. Sacred time is circular, it
represents the changing of the seasons, the rotating of the earth,
birth-life-death-renewal. Our lives are
dominated by the linear progression of time; we feel it slip through our
fingers like grains of sand. I
personally find this concept quite depressing, and so enjoy taking time to
notice the circular passage of time, which is much more uplifting and less
finite. Many critical design products
play with the concepts of finite time – Susanna Hertrich’s Chrono-Shredder
(Herford, et al., 2011) pessimistically shreds calendar days in front of your
eyes; where as the Clock of the Long Now (Stuff You Should Know, 2012) tries to
focus on the distant future, asking people to consider the impact their lives
will have made in 1,000 years.
To get the most out of the project, I decided to explore the
concept of an ageing timepiece from as many different perspectives as I could;
I made it my aim to come up with 10 different ideas around the theme. Through brainstorming both the topics of
ageing and timepieces separately and researching them I was able to come up
with 9 individual ideas, including my original wind-down watch design. Some were more fleshed out than others, but
from the 9 I was able to narrow my selection down to 3 possible designs, one of
which I would produce for the end of this module. Given the timeframe, I decided to prototype
the LED sundial.
 |
| Clock of the Long Now: Source |
References
Herford, M., Fast, F., Hundertpfund, J. & Kroger, M.,
2011. Now. Perceptions of Time and Contemporary Design. 1st ed.
Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag.
Stuff You Should Know, 2012. SYSK: What's the 10,000
year clock?. [Online]
Available at: http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/whats-the-10000-year-clock/
[Accessed 25 April 2015].
Available at: http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/whats-the-10000-year-clock/
[Accessed 25 April 2015].
van Hinte, E., 2004. Eternally yours: time in
design. 1st ed. Rotterdam.
