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PLAY clocksPLAY is experimenting with a variety of very slow abstract clocks.PLAY is a studio in the Interactive Institute, and like all studios PLAY has a guaranteed life span of no more than five years (although there exists a possibility to prolong this). In PLAY, we feel that five years is a reasonable time to accomplish what we want to do as a research group, and that after five years we should take the opportunity to move on, perhaps by starting other studios or similar constellations, perhaps by doing something completely different. PLAY joined the Interactive Institute in August, 1999, but had at that time already existed 1 1/2 year as a research group within the Viktoria Institute. We have thus chosen January 1, 1998 - the official start of the PLAY research group at the Viktoria Institute - as the starting point for the clocks, and thus the end date becomes December 31, 2002. We will use the clocks to count down the time until the group ceases to exist, but also as a representation of how long we have been around and what we have accomplished. Thus, the clocks will serve to introduce a sense of urgency and a realization that nothing last forever, but also to make us aware of and reflect on the group's history. The broader intention is to explore interaction design for different timespans. Whereas the timespans that are important for a typical computer application can be counted in seconds, minutes or hours, here we are interested in those those timespans that reflect lifetimes - of people, projects, organisations, and ideas. These can be counted not in minutes or hours but in months, years, decades, even centuries. We have previously explored slow technology - technology that invites moments of reflection and mental rest - mainly through physical installations in various places. For the clocks, we will initially use the PLAY homepage as the "place" of our clocks. Since the homepage is the main channel for information about the group, and something which people interested in the group will visit regularly but with a pretty low frequency (perhaps a few times a month), we feel that the homepage is a good place for displaying our slow clocks. The clocksWe will be adding new clocks to the PLAY homepage with a frequency of approximately one per month.Here are links to the previously posted clocks: |