Time Within

How can we bring the perception of time back to our bodies?

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For the Embodied Interaction course, we were asked to work on a project that would focus on our body and our perception of it. Together with my team, we decided to work on the perception of time and how we experience Time through our bodies.

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Since the invention of the pendulum clock in 1656, humans have been relying on clocks and watches to understand and organise time. We have somehow lost our ability to orient ourselves in time without the aid of external devices. Our body, in fact, has its own way of perceiving and organising time through circadian rhythms, “an endogenously driven roughly 24-hour cycle in biochemical, physiological or behavioural processes” that influences every aspect of our lives. It determines when we should sleep, eat and wake up, as well as our body temperature, behaviour and emotional state. Following the time division and organisation imposed on us by our society has, however, forced us to move away from our biological rhythm to conform to those of a capitalistic economy; “Humans have broken many links with the natural world. […] But go deep into a dark cave without a watch and after a few days out of the sunlight we revert to ancient patterns. Deprived of time cues, our rhythms slowly drift out of alignment with the outside world”. We should strive to reconnect to our embodied perception of time, to follow our body rhythms as this would lead us to conduct a healthier and happier lifestyle.

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During the research phase of the project, we looked at academic literature on humans and animals time perception, on human heart rate and on speculative and critical design. We found out that people belong to different chronotypes, meaning that their bodies are naturally inclined to be more active during earlier or later hours and that having a lifestyle that doesn’t respect that chronotype can cause depression and sleep deprivation. In the animal world, we saw that bees, for example, experience jet lag if moved from a timezone to another. Finally, we explored different ways in which we can experience time through our senses.

We conducted a digital ethnography study asking 15 people in different countries and age ranges if there is a relationship between time and the heart and what is, to them, the time of the heart. Most insights reflected on the difference between the biological meaning of time and the poetic connotation it can have. Participants talked about the aging of our heart, the emotional healing properties that time has on it, the duration of feelings, their influence on time perception and how “our heart is nothing but a living hourglass”.

Finally, we conducted two workshops with five participants each to see how they perceive time during different activities without looking at a clock and to speculate on how they would organise their lives if time was subjectively counted in heartbeats instead of seconds. We found out that most people can more or less perceive time but that the activity the are engaging in (fun or boring) and their age has a big impact on it. Moreover, people agreed that a subjective measure of time such as heartbeats would require a complete change of the way we organise our society but that it might have a positive impact on stress and time management.

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Given the insights we collected from research we decided to focus on creating a speculative design of a hourglass that follows the rhythm of one’s own heartbeat.

The development of the hourglass required different levels of material exploration to give the prototype the right feeling we were aiming for and to support the process of meaning-making. We discussed, thus, the perfect material to put inside of the hourglass; sand was the most obvious choice as it is used in traditional hourglasses but, as we wanted the project to face a multi-sensorial approach, we discarded sand in favour of a material that could offer sonic feedback when falling. We ruled out marbles and Orbeez for their roughness and finally, we settled for water. Water, in fact, not only allowed us to have a gentle sonic effect, but it is also an important historical symbol of purity, grace and life. This material lent the project an additional layer, connecting it to Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity, where our lives are represented as fragile, temporary, vulnerable and inclined to constant change.

To make the system work we used an Arduino nano 33 BLE connected to a heart rate sensor and to a small pump that would adjust its speed based on the heartbeat of the user.

Finally, we sketched the design using SketchUp and Blender and we created the structure for the prototype by vacuum forming two plastic pyramids to contain the water and creating a wooden and metal structure to hold them.

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As a means of a collaborative design project, we tried to challenge the classic idea of time by creating a speculative water hourglass which drops fall at the speed of one’s own heartbeat. The design aimed to bring awareness to our body while also making time subjective but still, almost, out of our direct control. When time is counted in heartbeats instead of seconds, in fact, it surely becomes much more subjective as the heart rate may vary quite a lot in different people; it is also true, however, that even though we might have some kind of power to increase or decrease our beats per minute (BPM), the heart is an involuntary muscle that we can’t really be in control of.

The hourglass contains 109,440 drops of water to match the average number of heartbeats per day. A person with a lower heart rate would live longer days, while one with a higher heart rate would see their days ending sooner.

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Optimistically, I hope Time Within can help people reflect on the topic of time as a social construct. It claims an urge for us to reconsider time by bringing our bodies and our identities to the centre of our focus. Of course, time is a status quo that can hardly be challenged but to keep things static is to render them nonthreatening and the sole action of questioning it and debating its objectiveness can trigger change by suggesting themes that have been outside the public discussion for way too long. Ideally, it will then inspire other designers to create projects that can challenge and call into question other social constructs to really use designs as a means of reflecting on and understanding the reality we live in. I hope this project can be used as a medium to briefly reconnect to our hearts and to find in its subjectivity the relief of a liquid organization of time where every individual experience matters and is taken into account.

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