Keeping Time: Brass Body

After a few initial cardboard prototypes, I settled on a shape that I was happy with.  Crucially, the final design came from a practical decision to machine the form in house.  There were two options for machining; waterjet cut out of house – exact precision but a time delay for processing and a higher cost, or machine by hand (guillotine and fret saw) – less precise but can be made very quickly for much lower prices.  I chose to make the casing by hand, and this meant that I had to get rid of the negative cut and that the test tube hole would have to be made with a standard size punch.
Cutting the form was simple, and bending all but the final bend was done easily in the workshop.  Problems came when the back plate had to be bent upward to close the box.  The final bend had to be hand hammered into shape over a square section tube, unfortunately leaving a few dents here and there. 

There were also issues with the first set of rivets made to hold the box into shape.  This was a communication error on my part, as I had envisioned pop rivets closing the case but was under the impression that they were unavailable.  The metal working technician, Rachael Baker, who was teaching me to make the casing, spent a long time hammering in a hand-worked rivet into the back, which was a job made more difficult by me as I had wanted stainless steel rivets – a much harder material to work with than brass.  Unfortunately the finished rivets didn’t look as neat as I’d hoped and the back of the casing had taken a bit of a beating as well.  Thankfully, it was a problem that was easily rectified and metal technician, Phil Hatton, helped me greatly by drilling out the rivets, hammering the back flat, and re-riveting the piece using pop rivets.

With the pop rivets in place, the back dents lessened and a black rubber O-ring holding the test tube secure, the final design is one that I’m very happy with.  As a prototype, I’m happy with the quality.  Now that I’ve made the piece, I can see where extra care would need to be taken to produce a commercial product, but I think that most of the problems that could have arisen (skewing of shape due to lost length in bending, wonky slot cutting etc.) were avoided due to proper planning, and the benefit of having an extremely simple design.

My only concern in this design is that it loses some feeling of heritage by not using the trio of wood, brass and glass.  Though the addition of wood would be purely aesthetic, I feel like the piece has a ‘fashionable’ but not one that is necessarily timeless or passive.  It’s a very nice object to look at, but if brass weren’t so popular a material, would it still be a nice object? Does the brass lessen the meaning of the object because it doesn’t naturally echo it? 

Keeping Time: Aesthetics

The form factor of the metronome was next on my hit list.  How was this object going to look?  My original design borrowed traditional material combinations from scientific equipment – wood, brass and glass – to modernise the archetypal metronome form, replacing the timing chart with a suspended glass test tube to collect the dust. 

Preliminary prototype

The first problem came when trying to work out how to make the glass square-based pyramid.  My idea was to use brass L-profiles running along each corner of the structure to glue the glass in to.  After speaking to the glass and metal technicians, I found out that the standard joining method would be to just glue the glass with UV cement using a former.  This would make the brass structurally unnecessary, and so using it felt to me like I was falsifying the construction in the design.  And so it was back to the drawing board!

Design development in Solidworks

For the next iteration, I took the design back to two components; a box to conceal the metronome workings and a stand to hold the test tube.  I wanted the materials use the same trio of materials for this design - wood for the box, brass for the stand – but this time, I reduced the glass element to just the test tube itself. 

After knocking out some Solidworks models, I still wasn’t happy with the design.  The proportions of the timepiece seemed wrong; the box was too large and seemed to dwarf the pendulum and the test tube. Then there was the issue of whether to hide the mechanism or open the box up and have it on show.

The metronome mechanism

The idea of displaying the metronome mechanism in a glass-fronted box bothered me.  If left completely revealed, the mechanism looks quite messy. The gears are partly hidden and the base plate from which it is suspended feels unsightly – it wasn’t designed to be seen.  Having no experience in woodworking, the simple box construction wasn’t going to give me a finish I was happy with and, overall, I just wasn’t happy with these designs.

It was only after talking to colleagues that I decided to adapt one of my design elements.  Instead of creating one bent brass piece to hold the test tube, why didn’t I create the whole thing from flat brass plate and bend a box out of it?

Keeping Time: An Introduction

After isolating the meaning that I wanted my second exhibition piece to convey through dust collection, I started thinking about what form the piece could take.  I briefly considered using dust as a base material for the product but quickly decided that that was a much larger project in and of itself and may also detract from the physical act of collecting dust.

I spent a long time debating if the dust collecting piece was related enough to the LED Sundial for the two to be cohesively displayed together.  Though they are both about time, and how we experience it, one is focused very much on the present and the other on our progression from the present to the past.  I also needed to think of an object to embed the dust in to; something that would allow me to collect dust while also resonating the message of time progression.

I decided to go back to basics and look again at timepieces.

One thing I have noticed about my own work methodology is that if I get stuck, or end up going round in circles, I need to take a step back.  A big step back.  Often all the way back to first principles.  It is there that my thoughts become clearer and I can start to think laterally again.

During this investigation I hit upon the idea of using a metronome.

A metronome is a unique timepiece in the sense that it displays the progression of time, without having any way to record it.  Unlike a clock, you see no progression of numbers or dates, but you are constantly aware of the audible tick of the pendulum driven mechanism.  It is the definitive timepiece for revealing the present; there is no record of the past within it and no prediction of the future, only the now.

In this way, the metronome was the obvious choice for pairing with dust collection – the metronome displays the present while the dust, settling from our present environment, charts the progression to the past. Keeping Time.

Collecting Dust

This is the contents of my hoover.  Don't switch off.  Let me explain.

During my last module, I began investigating the concept of time; how we percieve it and the different types of time that effect our world.  I wanted to continue this exploration in my Final Major Project, and produce a range of products that correspond to my Learning Agreement..

Functional objects that reflect the human condition; playing on our perceptions of time, ageing and religion through domestic products.

To develop a product alongside my LED Sundial, but without infringing on it, I decided to look again at the philosophies about time and our connections with the natural world.

The German phenomenologist, Martin Heidegger (as quoted in The Spell of the Sensuous), describes the concept of the present as "usually represented in the sense of a succession of a calculable sequence of nows."  These 'nows' chart a linear progression of time; this linear time that feels so inevitably finite, and what prompted my study into the more spiritual, uplifting circular time for the development of the LED Sundial.  I began looking at the way we define our time. 

What is the difference between past and present? 

When does the present become the past? 

How do we measure our time?


David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous has become a pivitol book in my exploration into time and the natural world.  It details and debates some of the most interesting philosophies around the subject, and highlighted for me the inherent connection between space and time - or rather place and time.  Space-time is now a widely regarded scientific theory, but the abstract philosophies behind it can be extrapolated to expand our understanding of the past and memories.  The theory states that the place that an event occured in is intrincically important to the event; when you remember a memory, you can frequently pin point the exact place it happened, not just by location but by your connection to that environment through your senses.  I started to consider our past environments and how they are preserved. 

How could we measure the progression of our present to our past and take our environment into account? 

It was at that point that I started thinking about dust.

Dust is all around us, whether we like it or not.  Contrary to popular belief, only a small percentage of house dust is made us of human skin; most of it is hair, soil, air pollution particles and fibre from textiles including your clothing, your carpet and your curtains. 

In my family home we have a lot of pets, including some very large dogs who shed a lot of hair.  Even the most diligent cleaner can't avoid the inevitable build up of dog hair behind the washing machine and under the fridge.  Months or years after a pet passes away, you'll suddenly decide to sweep under the fridge and lo and behold, a wad of molted pet hair appears at your feet and your memories about your beloved deceased pet all come flooding back to you.

Dust is the forgotten fibres of your wooly jumper; it's the pine needles from that Christmas tree that you didn't get rid of until it had turned thoroughly crispy; it's the brick powder that the builders covered the house in when you had your kitchen done.  It falls as a linear memory of the past from our environments.

Like a living sedimentary rock, it embodies our environment as a corporeal fossil.

And only bit of it is made of your old skin...