Process blog, ramblings, thoughts, will be organized later.
….time, how does one begin to understand and express it? Our first class in studio was a rhythm class with a music Professor. He spoke of moments of ‘crusis’ wherein people are especially cognizant of time passing as they experience what I like to describe as both mental and physical ‘keyframes’.
The echo effects on Aftereffects is a potential interesting way of illustrating the above idea:
I’m sitting down and get up to get my phone. With my mind concentrated on getting my phone, I most cognizant of time having passed once I get my phone, from having got from point A to point B, both physically and goal wise. I am less aware of myself and time transition movements between the points. How is time experienced? How does time pass mentally in comparison to clocked time?
Standing on the shoulders of giants:
Who else has looked at time in interesting ways?
Philip Zimbardo (notorious for the 1971 stanford prison experiment) says that “happiness and success are rooted in a trait most of us disregard: the way we orient toward the past, present and future.” He suggests we calibrate our outlook on time as a first step to improve our lives. It’s not a new point, but it is an interesting and insightfully clear way of putting it.
Planetary Scientists studying possible organisms on other planets tried to find the sort of organisms living in the harshest conditions. Actinobacteria in the dirt under the permafrost is 400,000 years old. It’s DNA is growing and changing constantly, even in subzero temperatures.
Rachel Sussman is a conceptual artist and photographer working with biologists and archaeologists to document the oldest organisms on earth. After working “the oldest living things are a record and celebration of our past, a call to action in the present and a barometer of our future”
Time warp…what is time on a cosmic scale? Well, the universe is expanding and accelerating forever as a consequence of dark energy, this ‘forever’ manifests time as infinite, even as space appears finite. What is the implication that the universe is like a box of gas with molecules that expand infinitely? The multi-verse of low to high fluctuations in entropy. Last 10 billion years, has been an expanding universe, and eventually it’ll all die off and thus begins the black hole era, and that’s another set of 100 million years, and even longer after that is another longer era of the ‘empty space’…..Sean Carroll, NASA theorist
In studio, we will look at how time manifests psychologically, experientially, visually and how the environment might be made to influence its perception.
Two separate exercises
- Lines (Insert longer desciption)
- Physical Artifacts/How do you design something to last 100,000 years, 10,000 years…..or even 100? Factors to consider: the manufacturing process and the artifacts inherent physical qualities, preservation techniques, the rituals and social practice surrounding it, it’s emotional durability, the context and environment it’s made and preserved within, the system it builds around itself….how can it embody the values of my generation and bring it forward into the next? And the next? And why preserve it? And what will my research methods be?
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Lines
Comparative analysis of existing systems:
Parallel lines vs. Snaked Lines:
Parallel lines would be like the example above at McDonalds where you see multiple cash registers and one general pick up area. The snaked lines have physical barriers
There’s actually a very interesting psychological phenomenon for the two, wherein overall net customer satisfaction at the end of the restaurant experience is actually higher for a snake line than a parallel one. The parallel system risks perceived unfairness; if a customer who arrived in before another got in a line that was slower than the later arrivals, they might resent not being served more immediately.
Some interesting reading on the psychology of queues:
http://www.columbia.edu/~ww2040/4615S13/Psychology_of_Waiting_Lines.pdf
Starbucks’ snake system is helped by a little island counter splitting up the little hallway space. It provides a nice space to rest your elbows or lean against while in line.
Piada, a very popular Chipotle-styled Italian street food restaurant snakes their line in front of a large menu board with beautifully printed paper menus towards the entrance of the snake. Moving the line along the food preparation aisle with clear glass keeps people occupied as they watch their Piada roll being made as they wait and shuffle forward in the line. They are kept occupied nearly every step of the process.
To be continued with:
- library holds?
- online queues — — digi/physical — -later went back to explore oishi’s queue system — see below
- Disneyland lines
- Traffic, rush hour, and road rage
Dishes weren’t served in the same order they were ordered in, but the fact that people sit down at a table upstairs away from the cashier counter keeps the discontent at bay — the board up top dings with each order completed, and people are thus occupied with talking to each other or waiting comfortably seated while the food is being made. This is an example of a digital queue, that allows for a lack of physical ‘waiting in line’.
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I went back again to Oishi the next day for another in depth study and to get some numbers, and below are my notes taken on site:
The diagonal carpet is interesting, people stand in the center, looking right to read the menu before turning, and stepping directly up to the counter. Even though the space is small, and I can easily see confusion arising from ‘where is the line?’ the different orientations make it clear who is still deciding and who is ordering. This is an important point because when we went to RiTa’s (shaved ice vendor, not really an eating place) the multiple queues and menu-above-the-cashier format made it very confusing where to stand within the line. Having to ask others where the line ends or otherwise risk cutting in line is uncomfortable. (Why is being able know where the line starts and ends so important? See quick example below of Rita’s messy lines; I’m immediately turned off)
Do you see the line? No? Well neither could I. A lot of people milling around towards the back were taking their time to decide because they did not move up when the queue finished with someone’s order. There is no defined pick up line either. You ordered and received from the same window, but that isn’t particularly clear. I asked people where the line is and received a “I think they are all lines”, “I’m still deciding” and “well, I’m in line, but still deciding”
“queue” calculus as spoken about in the essay “Psychology of Time” is very distressing and evident here.
Back to Oishi:
A key feature besides the digital queue with sound alerts is the free tea in the waiting areas:
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The issue with project 2…starts with needing a different conceptual framework than we are used to. The research methods usually employed might need critical reassessment. What questions are worth asking?
Research methods for #2: Look at the past to design for the future (we live in an interesting time…the change happened exponentially and very suddenly in comparison to the rest of human history…how much merit can we put into looking at the past to inform a future that has already developed on one scale (temporal) to be fundamentally different? Or has it?), Assess your system and try to figure out what underlying assumptions its built on and how far into the future you can still safely assume such things, look at what sort of artifacts you have around you that has a history, how and what about it allowed it to move forward?
Somethings from the past, old technology still enjoyable/useable/?:
- Large paintings; there’s still something wonderful about seeing it physically; even if the subject is no longer as culturally relevant, there is something beautiful in how it’s made — incredibly time consuming and hard to replicate…
- cranking music box (brought up by Anna)— intuitive form, universally understood with communication in both physical medium and temporally (music). There’s an immediate grasp of ‘how’ to use/enjoy it,
- Hammurabi’s Code: We preserve it now because it’s one of the oldest decipherable texts….but how did it last long enough to become that? Well….it was huge, written in stone and put in the ‘townsquare’. It was accessible and made to be relevant in the day to day lives of everyone in that society. As Babylon rose and fell, did its conquerors keep it for it’s novelty/importance to the people….? After a critical mass of time passed, it would’ve been kept because it was rare…?
- playing cards, where’d they come from and why do they look the way they do….Ex: briscola, tarot cards, chinese mahjyong, chess, what about games in general? ball based games — its history, why was it preserved? How was it preserved? What can I learn from this? Games will probably preserve themselves — they are abstractions of fundamental human experiences, so I don’t need to worry about using a design intervention to preserve them…
Some qualities to look for:
- “…a record and celebration of our past, a call to action in the present and a barometer of our future”
- A interaction that is fundamentally understood/intuitive and will work independent of technological changes (?)
- If it’s something from this day and age, it should embody something pivotal about this era
Ideas floating:
- …Make a painting and hope it is poignant and culturally relevant enough to land in a museum?
- Create a powerful cult with new symbols that synthesize old and current ones.
- Create a powerful underground/secret cult with one very unique symbol and then rely on rumor and hearsay to perpetuate it but like…since it’s a secret conspiracy, it doesn’t actually have to exist for real to be preserved.
- Compilation of hand written notes and sketches from great figures of our time…
- create an addicting game; make the next Go. (Go, the 4,000 year old Chinese strategy game, as a great embodiment of ‘The Art of War’— an enduring classic.)
Some project angles:
- create a artifact that a critical mass that society would find valuable, thus it’ll be preserved by the government/museums/collectors, etc
- Just pick something already and build up a system around it to develop enduring emotional poignancy/practices and rituals around it
- pick something that’s already been around for a while and reinforce the systems that have allowed it to do so
- focus on the physical/production behind a product so that it becomes more valuable the older it is (ex: chinese tea cups are enhanced by tea use, the older it is, the better). Look at physical aging processes.
