#3 Experimental Clock
Description
The sense of time drifting away always comes with a conscious growth of
memory.
Time wouldn’t matter anymore if one's memory doesn’t exist
anymore.
-- our time doesn’t count while we fall asleep. In this way,
a quarter of yesterday is eaten away along with the disappearing
memory of my dreams.
So, how much time did you lose last night? And how much time are you
going to lose tonight?
Design Process
I feel that time does not advance linearly and at a uniform speed. The perception of time varies with individuals and many other conditions. I try to describe time with different other elements and here’s what I came up with:
Concept 1:
Tide comes up and goes down with the cycle, the islands could look like
little "breathing" dots from up above, tracking time with its own rythm.
Concept 2:
Body condition. Your current body conditions can affect how you feel about
time as well. For example, time passes more slowly when you’re nervous and
anxious, and could be really fast when you’re in the “flow”. As it's shown
in the sketch, when you put the mouse on the left half of the canvas, it
means you're in the "flow", the bubbles will appear one per second or
slower, probably with easing effect; And when you put the curser on the
right half, it means you're nervious, each second will draw 2-3 bubbles.
Concept 3:
Memory. time won’t matter anymore if memory doesn’t exist anymore.
This concept seems to be the most interesting and abstract one to work
with. Though each day is equally 24 hours to everyone, none of us share
the exact same "awaken time". I'm also fascinated about what happened to
me when I'm asleep, and who took my memory of my dreams?
Pseudocode:
- Outer circle: normal real-time 12-hour-clock with second() / minute() / hour()/ map();
- Inner circle: 24-hour-clock time counter, starts at the time you click on it (when you wake up) and stops at the time when you click it again (when you sleep);
- Button in the middle: shows like a recording button for clicking, use Boolean to set the two status;
- In the corner: print today’s date in memory of the time you lost. Press a key to save today’s counter.
Refelction
Though the overall logic of this concept is easy to understand, I had a
lot struggle with the inner cirle, such as how to save the current time
and use if later, how to distinguish the time of the first click and the
current time... Also, the original concept was to record the hours of
your awaken time, but it would be difficult to observe, so I replaced
the hour() with second() just to make it easier to see how it works.
I personally enjoyed messing around with these codes but sometimes it
can be really frustrated when you have tried everything you can think of
and none of them worked out...
Also, big big thanks to Bex Ruvalcaba, cassandra hradil, Elena, Eddie
and Faye!