Studio II Final Submission
Throughout this semester I have learned a great deal bout both project related things and non project related things. I have learned how important it is to choose your team wisely for a group project and also team management skills to keep that group working on track. I have also discovered different workflow strategies to make sure I am at my most productive and also when I need to take a break, for example I now know that I can’t focus solely on Arduino code for a week straight for all of my papers. Having said that though I have learned and further developed my programming skills and have picked up how to program an Arduino. I think the hardest challenge I have had to face this semester is letting other people do the work and trusting that they will get it done. I have always struggled with this as I feel only i know what the quality of the job needs to be but now that I am at university everyone I work with should in theory be at the same level if not better than me when it comes to this so they will have a fair idea as to what the outcome needs to be. What also made this hard for me in this project was that I didn’t really feel I knew my team members well enough, sure I knew Adam but as for the other four (Shane, Josh, Austin and Osamu) I had never really talked to them let alone worked with them so I was not really sure how it would go. I guess that is why it is good to have a blog so you can see what they have done in the past.
If I had to do it all again, I would have worked with a smaller team. That is the main thing I would change simply because it is harder to work with a bigger group especially when things need to happen in a sequence so not everyone can be working on things at the exact same time. Over my last few blog posts i have reflected on the project a little more in depth so you can find those in the index to see some more of my overall reflection on the semester.
Here are the the final videos, the second one is not shown in the installation as it does not suit the whole them of it but shows how the watch reacts to different users and can be used to show their perception of time in different situations.
All posts for this project can be found with the hashtag #ctec503movement
Project Reflections:
-Revisit of the brief
-Installation Completion
Concept blogs:
-Initial idea
-Potential direction
-Scientific Research
-Further research and justification
-Existing product research
-Real world observation
-Concept video development 1
-Concept video development 2
-Concept Clarification
-Concept reflection
-Real world situation idea
-Real world test 1
-Ethics issue
-Group allocations
Construction blogs:
-Initial prototype
-Further development
-Working prototype and existing product research
-Soldering it together
-Neopixel development
-3D model and presentation research
-Prototype test
Presentation Blogs:
-Initial thoughts and research
-Presentation design
-Installation Completion
For this project we set out to bring attention to our objective reality and provoke conversation on whether or not we experience the world to the maximum potential we can. “Tyme” measures the user’s heart rate and then presents their own experience of passing time visually in a way that seems more like a natural process (almost like breathing) rather than a mechanical ticking, this is to bring a air of personalisation to it. We used the human perception of time, or chronoception, to develop an insight for the user into how we as humans have gentrified something so complex as time into a basic standard measure which in reality is not how we experience the world at all. In different situations minutes can feel like hours and hours can feel like seconds as our chronoception is the result of a multitude of external factors that we don’t have a whole lot of control over. By focussing on one single aspect that can affect chronoception (cognitive function linked to heart rate) we are enticing the user to consider our visual representation of their experience of the passage of time but also consider all the other factors that can affect it. Thus in turn forcing them to realise that they are only experiencing a small sliver of the world around them and that there is so much more to our universe that we are unable to comprehend but if we could, our entire objective reality would be a whole lot different. By inciting this conversation we are changing the way people look at things, making them consider their surroundings more critically and developing a greater awareness of their reality.
The field of time perception and objective realities is relatively unexplored and for the parts that have been researched, the developed ideas and concepts tend to have very mild crossover and a fair amount of contradictions. That is mainly because not a whole lot is known in the fields and so there is no general consensus yet as to what is correct and what is not. This is where our projects fits nicely, as we are not entirely developing any research in the field but more linking the ideas of time perception and objective reality together. Our project draws inspiration from theories set out by Donald Hoffman and David Eagleman which talk about objective realities and time perception respectively. Hoffman sets out the idea that what we are experiencing as our apparent “objective reality” may not actually be the actual reality that we live in, he says that our brain is taking cues from the actual reality and reconstructing this world that we see (Hoffman, 2015). Eagleman places a huge emphasis on the fact that we do not have physical time receipting organs in our bodies and therefore our chronoception relies heavily on other external factors and our brain then reconstructs what we experience as time from these cues (Eagleman, 2009). There is a large crossover between the two concepts that we set out to link and develop and in doing so we have also produced an artefact that goes about presenting the apparent passage of time to the certain individual who is using the watch. In this sense it is much like the breathing clock designed by Max Schmidt [1], a different way of representing time rather than the monotonous ticking that we have come to think of as standard. The main difference between our project and the breathing clock though is that the breathing clock is more of a countdown timer that you set to whatever time you want, “tyme” interprets the users cognitive state and presents them with their own experience of time passing at that moment, so it is constantly changing. Another project that brings awareness to our experience of time is Durr by Skrekkogle [2] which vibrates every five minutes to make the user aware of how fast time is passing. This idea however, is still bound to the assumption that time passes as seconds, minutes and hours and thus differs from our project which focuses on the idea that time is in fact a personal experience that is different for everyone. Through the development of this concept and artefact we have not only challenged the basic assumptions we make about time but we have actually shown how abstract the idea of time really is and that representing it through standard measures (such as seconds, minutes and hours) is completely inaccurate to how we interact with the world, therefore challenging how we experience our world and perceive reality.
[1]: https://www.designboom.com/design/breathing-clock-by-max-schmidt-shifts-the-perception-of-time/
[2]: http://skrekkogle.com/projects/durr/
Hoffman, D. (2015, March). Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is? [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is
Eagleman, D. M. (2009). Brain time. What’s Next: Dispatches from the Future of Science, edited by M. Brockman. New York: Vintage Books.(Reprinted at Edge. org.)
