Case studies: Everyday objects of meaning
Seven and a half
Disrupting Clocks
Introduction – With the everyday application of technology rapidly increasing through its development in the field of Interaction Design and Human-Computer Interaction its influence on our lives is growing. It enables us to do more, while acting faster and becoming more precise. Not only does the use of artifacts influence what we do and how we do things. Its influence in our daily lives goes beyond that. As artifacts tell us how to act to ‘successfully’ complete our tasks, they imply why we do them like that.
Project Goal – In order to investigate and anticipate technological mediation, I designed two ‘Disrupting Clocks’. These counterfactual artifacts position themselves in the field of research through design. They explore, through a material speculation approach, the ability of explicitly
materializing morality in the design of the (alarm) clock. This work is informed by a post-phenomenological understanding of the role of technological mediation and Verbeek’s concept of materializing morality in design processes.
Project context – We live in a 24/7 society. It promises us everything, everywhere, at any time. It creates the perception that there is no limit and limited time is therefore irrelevant. With this new “timelessness”, our 24/7 society is pushing us into unchartered territory. It created major strides in human productivity but at the cost of time-off, downtime, and even sleep.
Over centuries, humankind has strived to get a ‘grip on time’ by inventing temporal structures like years, weeks, hours, and minutes that manifested themselves through design into calendars, hour glasses, clocks, and alarm clocks (Boorstin). They gave us a multi-dimensionality (Pschetz) to time that allowed for the different paces and rhythms of our everyday lives. Though, as our ability to disrupt ourselves from the endless continuity of time seems to dissolve when time endures for 24 hours a day, 7 days per week, we risk losing our ability to demarcate the start and ending of time periods that once opened us up to different and differently paced ways of living.
Uninvited Guests
We set out to address some of these questions during our research, focusing on three key thematic areas which we titled ‘The Neural Network’, ‘Objects with Attitude’ and ‘Defiant Behaviours’. For these three areas we developed a series of narratives and scenarios that fell within the useful-critical-deviant spectrum.
Following this rapid scenario development exercise, the project’s focus quickly moved to connected home within the context of elderly healthcare and remote tracking, as it is touted as one of the most compelling IoT applications. Situated behind this, is the bigger, more political issue around the future of healthcare and the growing argument to replace human care givers with robots and connected, networked, smart devices. Whilst there are undeniable benefits to monitoring and tracking the elderly in their homes, we wanted to pause and reflect on some of the more complex human behaviours we are likely to encounter along the way. What are the messy, whimsical, unintended human behaviours that might collide with the one-size-fits-all ‘care’ that many smart devices are designed to deliver?