Design with time in mind
Sjors Timmer, EuroIA 2013
If you look at
Twitter on iOS7 Facebook on iOS7
If you look at the recent rise of mobile companies, like Twitter, Facebook
Or
Instagram on iOS7 Snapchat on iOS7
Instagram and especially SnapChat than it cannot have escaped you that they all have a similar approach to time. They show you the last hour, minutes or even seconds and they are brilliant at it. When you look around you at conferences, in restaurants in busses and in bed, everywhere you find people forever refreshing their feed, forever sucked into the eternal now
We’re great at building tools for the now, but what about tools for working with the future?
1. Time artefacts
2. Time in mind 3. Time in
digital
1. Time artefacts
e further we look into the future
Present
Time
Future
Degree of uncertainty
e higher the degree of uncertainty
Present
Time
Future
The problem is that the further we try to think ahead the more uncertain events become
Cone of uncertainty
Present Time
Degree of uncertainty
Future
This is what futurists call the cone of uncertainty, meaning that the further ahead we look the more scenarios become possible. This of-course can be good or bad depending on if you want change or continuity
We build “designer environments” in which human reason is able to far outstrip the computational ambit of the unaugmented biological brain.
- Andy Clarkin Being ere
What we need to think with time and uncertainty is a system to think in. It’s an example of what Andy Clark, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh calls designer environments, an arrangement of the outside world that allows us to be a lot smarter than we could if we would rely on our brain alone
Historic design challenges— Priests— Emperors— Popes— Kings— Scientists
This history of making designer environments for time started long ago. For centuries people have devoted their time to struggle with design challenges at hand
Stonehenge
How might we make sense of the sun, the moon, the seasons and the years? What can inform us about the right time for sowing and harvesting? For the early humans time was very much connected with the earth and the heavens. Priests built the first mapping of the months, seasons and years based on the moon, sun and stars. The amazing alignment of stonehenge to the mid summer and mid winter sun shows the outstanding job they did.
Fasti Antiates Maiores
Fasti Antiates Maiores (ca. 60 BC), a Roman calendar from before the Julian reform, with the seventh and eighth months still named Quintilis ("QVI") and Sextilis ("SEX"), and with a intercalary month, this month meant to fix the year became a mess because it was up to the emperor to decide when it came. Julius Caesar set out to fix the mess and was rewarded with the renaming of Quintilis is his honour
Julian Calendar
In the 1500 years many small improvements were made by monk/scholars. But with the Zodiac and illustrations you can still see how time was very much a living thing between the people, the earth and the heavens above
Pope Gregory XIII
In an attempt to celebrate Easter on the date agreed upon in 325. Pope Gregory XIII was the last of the great time reformers. In his name scientist managed to fix the system of leap years and came to the conclusion that 11 days should go to get the calendar in sync with the seasons again. Although the first countries switched in the years following 1582, it took until 1923 before Greece decided to go from 15 February to 1 March in one night
e Gregorian calendar is one of the most successful ideas in the history of civilisation.
- Dan FalkAuthor of In Search of Time
KingsMaximilian I
Kings meanwhile had another problem, how to set the legitimacy rule in historical context? For that reason they were already early on experimenting with family trees and timelines. And although we’ve long since abandoned the idea of counting in the year of our Kings their work can be seen as an early frontrunner of the Gantt chart
KingsMaximilian I
The red area shows the cut-out from the previous slide. It’s an enormous woodcut ordered by Maximilian I, and a print of it can be found at the British Museum
Maximilian used vivid printed images like this to establish the genealogy and legitimacy of his house and the authority of his rule, both of which were actually newer and shakier than he would like to admit.
- Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Graftonin Cartographies of Time
JohnHarrison
In 1714, the British government offered a longitude prize for a method of determining longitude at sea, with the awards ranging from £10,000 to £20,000 (several million pounds in modern terms) depending on accuracy.
H5
And John Harrison with the H4 (followed by the H5) was the first one to make a workable version. From that moment, time wouldn’t be the same again.
After 4000 years...We wound up with a neat system of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years to break the in"nity of time into manageable chunks.
A set of tools and design patterns
Present
Degree of uncertainty
Future
PlannerCalendar
Timeline
Scenarios
e clock dissociated time from human events and helped create belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences; the special world of science. By the close of the seventeenth century, time was seen as an abstract entity that marched forward without regards for human activity.
- Lewis Mumfordin In Search of Time
To tame time we’ve built a scaffolding so big and so deeply ingrained that it has changed our experience of the world profoundly
2. Time in mind
A short history1. If this, then that2. Language3. Story telling
We can think about the evolution of time-thinking in three steps, first we got a gut feeling for an if this, than that chain. We developed a language and a further development of language helped us to tell stories
You might recognise this
Observe
Scenarios
Act
Reflect
We can think about the evolution of time-thinking in three steps, first we got a gut feeling for an if this, than that chain. We developed a language and a further development of language helped us to tell stories
Mental time travel
Mental time travel comprises the mental reconstruction of personal events from the past and the mental construction of possible events in the future.
- omas Suddendorf and Michael Corballisin Mental time travel and the evolution of the human mind, Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs, 1997
Procedural Semantic Episodic
Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland
Scenarios of futures (and pasts)
Temporal construal theory
e greater the temporal distance, the more likely are events to be represented in terms of a few abstract features that convey the perceived essence of the events
- Yaacov Trope and Nira Libermanin Temporal Construal, Psychological Review 2003
Many of us overestimate the uncertainty
Present
Time
Degree of uncertainty
Future
Time perspective
Time perspective is the often nonconscious personal attitude that each of us holds toward time.
- Philip Zimbardo and John Boydin Paradox of Time
PastPositive
Their system is a system of five independent axes, meaning that scoring high or low on one axe doesn’t necessarily correlate with any of the other axes. The first ax of past positive where the focus is on the "good old days", past successes, nostalgia, etc.
PastNegative
PastPositive
Past negative: focus on regret, failure, all the things that went wrong
PresentHedonist
PastNegative
PastPositive
Present hedonistic: living in the moment for pleasure and avoiding pain, seek novelty and sensation
PresentFatalist
PresentHedonist
PastNegative
PastPositive
Present fatalists are people also stuck in the now but for different reasons, for them there’s no point of making any planning, since they feel no control over their live
Futures
PresentFatalist
PresentHedonist
PastNegative
PastPositive
And futures: the most recent category shaped by education, upbringing and society. We have to learn to work with the future and for the future.
Presents may be the invisible men and women of the twenty-"rst century, whereas futures live and play by the rules of time.
- Philip Zimbardo and John Boydin Paradox of Time
FuturesPresentHedonist
PastPositive
They say that the healthiest way to live life is high in past positive, cherish the good times and feel grateful to those things that have happen’t to you. Medium in present positive, enjoy the now, but not more than you can afford and medium in future positive
A broader time horizon creates a more stable now
Observe
Scenarios
Act
Reflect
Once you’ve created a positive feedback loop between scenarios, actions and reflections, you can create a more stable now
Discover your own Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory at bit.ly/time-test
We have an amazing ability to use our minds to travel time, yet due to personal and social differences everyone uses these skills differently
3. Time in Digital
Cone of uncertainty
Present Time
Degree of uncertainty
Future
Time horizon
Observe
Scenarios
Act
Reflect
Ask two questions
1. What is the time frame?
Nearby Far away
Degree of uncertainty
2. What is the degree of uncertainty?
Low
High
e time/uncertainty quadrant
Low uncertainty
High uncertainty
Nearby time Far away time
And we can plot these two questions on a time/uncertainty quadrant, so we can explore four areas from nearby and low uncertainty to far away and high uncertainty
Patterns
We can than start to fill this quadrant with the design patterns at hand
Re!ections and scenarios
Patterns that we can use to help people craft scenarios and reflect
Low uncertainty/Nearby time
Lists
Any.do on iOS7
Circle
Partly cloudy on iOS7
Grids
Calendar on iOS6 Sunrise on iOS6 Cal on iOS6
Time lines
10.000 feet on the internet
Lanyrd
Lanyrd on iOS6And a combination of them, such as cleverly done by Lanyrd, who cover the past, the present and the future in an interesting way.
Low uncertainty/Far away time
Timehop
Timehop on iOS7
Google Finance
Google Finance on the Web
[How might] we make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare?
- Stewart BrandCo-founder of e Long Now FoundationAuthor of How Buildings Learn
Life planner
What if you push planning to the extreme and create an interface that allows you to map out your life for the next 50 years?
High uncertainty/Nearby time
Everest
Everest on iOS7
Lift
Lift on iOS7
High uncertainty/Far away time
Face retirement
http://faceretirement.merrilledge.com/
Bring the future to the now
Design "ction
Or the now to the future (Microsoft Office 2018)
Bucket lister
Bucketlister on iOS7
Orbit
We don’t have a clear metaphor for anything longer than a year. I tried to explore this through Orbit, an app that allows you to shoot events in to orbit and have them revisit you every so many years
An amazing ability to think in time
A rich and deep history of design patterns
Plenty of opportunities
So, concluding we got
e time is now
ank you!
Sjors Timmer, EuroIA 2013
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