Translator: Cihan Ekmekçi Reviewer: Leonardo Silva
If you are like most people,
the first thought in your mind every single waking day is,
''What time is it?"
''Am I late?"
And you reach for your smartphone to check the time.
Our lives today move so fast,
from instant meals to fast-track degrees,
to speed dating -
Maybe we can squeeze in a seven-minute work out
or a five-minute meditation?
The pace of American life is massively accelerating.
And we feel this pressure to do it all, to have it all.
We're always on the clock,
minutes and seconds ticking by, keeping track of our experience.
Everything in our lives is timestamped;
work is costed by hours, even child births are scheduled.
Clock time as we know it today developed because of modern technologies.
And it's come to rule our lives,
these modern lives where we feel stressed, overwhelmed and perpetually behind
like we are always out of time.
We all know this feeling.
It's no wonder that the term "digital detox"
was recently introduced to the Oxford American Dictionary.
"Digital detox" is a period
during which a person refrains from using smartphones and computers.
It's regarded as an opportunity to reduce stress
and focus on social interaction in the physical world.
The idea is simple. Completely disconnect and reset.
And it's a great idea, but I don't think this is a realistic approach
to dealing with the stress of clock time in our day-to-day lives.
This seems like a uniquely adult problem, right?
As children, we aren't burdened by a constant worry of lateness.
I grew up here in Colorado
and one of my favorite things about Colorado is the sunshine
and the vastness of the sky.
"Three hundred days of sunshine" is a sort of unofficial slogan.
It was actually coined by a railroad company in the 1870s
with the intention of attracting people from the East to come out to the West.
Colorado doesn't quite maintain 300 days of sunshine,
but the experience of living here does feel that way.
And I don't know about you all, but for me,
living in this bright, sunny place makes me really happy.
As a child I spent endless hours outside in the sunshine,
exploring all the ways that time is expressed in nature.
I noticed how quickly the snow would melt after a spring storm,
a sign that the Earth was warming and summer was on the way.
And my dad taught me to identify constellations in the night sky.
I learned to recognize a difference in the stars
between the spring and the fall.
As a child growing up, I was deeply absorbed in nature's time.
I'd let days pass without counting hours, clock time didn't exist,
but as adults, we learn to live in the world of clocks.
In 2013, I moved to New York City and I felt this to an extreme.
I felt like there was always more to be done
or somewhere else to be, like I never quite had enough time.
Living in the city, I discovered a new way of life.
It was gritty, diverse, creative and authentic.
But for all the ways New York was a thrilling and incredible place to live,
for me it was also really hard.
Every day I spent more than an hour underground commuting on the subway,
I exercised in a gym without windows
and socializing meant spending time with my friends late at night
in dark bars.
I would lose track of time being indoors all day working on my computer,
existing in this climate-controlled, noise-canceling, concrete construct.
The months and years blurred together
as I was completely disconnected from every aspect of the natural world.
I never knew what time the Sun would rise and set,
but it didn't seem to matter.
In the speed and hustle of cities, we need clocks
because there's no other way to tell the time.
Nature is confined to planter boxes and it's impossible to see the stars.
As a technologist, I thought I might be able to build a project
that might help me solve this feeling of darkness and disconnect.
So I started building custom electronics to measure light
and I started testing light-tracking devices
that were already on the market.
I had this idea that if I could measure and quantify
the natural light I was exposed to every day,
I might be able to find some kind of solution
to this feeling of darkness and overwhelm.
I tried really hard to find value in this quantified approach,
but really quickly realized that the data I was collecting
wasn't teaching me anything.
If I wasn't getting enough sunlight like when I was commuting underground,
I didn't need a smart device to tell me about it.
(Laughter)
The artist in me was more concerned with how it felt to live in this darkness,
and I realized that my goal for this project
wasn't about solving a problem.
It was an exploration into the human experience of daylight.
How, then, could I use modern technology to reconnect me
with the natural rhythms and cycles of the Earth?
In merging these interests as both a technologist and an artist,
I decided to create a daylight clock that gives a dynamic expression of time
based on the length of daylight for a particular location.
Here's how it works.
So this clock has a single hand that rotates 360 degrees
over the course of daylight hours.
When the Sun is down, the hand rests in the 12 o'clock position without moving.
And in the morning, when the Sun rises,
the hand starts rotating around the clock face.
Eventually, the hand will return back to that 12 o'clock position
in the evening when the Sun sets.
Because the Sun rises and sets at a different time
every single day of the year,
the hand of my clock moves at a different speed every day.
It rotates faster in the winter and slower in the summer.
At night, the hand doesn't move at all.
The analog simplicity of the clock face is contrasted
by the complexity of this system behind the scenes.
On the back of the clock, there is a microcontroller
which is a simple computer and that connects wirelessly to a server.
The server, then, pulls sunrise and sunset data
based on the latitude and longitude of the device.
The microcontroller will then calculate the speed at which to rotate the hand.
And the clock is smart, it knows where it is,
so if it's moved to a new location, it can easily update itself.
There were many iterations in building this project.
And although a lot of my focus
went into the hardware and software aspects of the piece,
the aesthetic design was one of the most fun parts for me.
Inspired by the Sun, I chose to use brass as the material for this clock,
because of the warm glow that it cast, a sort of subtle reminder of daylight.
The simplicity of the single hand draws inspiration from a sundial.
This physical clock is an elegant design object,
but there's only one of them and it can only really live in one place.
It was also important to me to create a version of this timepiece
that I could share with others.
So I built a Google Chrome extension with the same clock interface.
Every time I open a new tab in my browser,
this daylight clock is the first thing that appears.
Like the physical clock, it pulls location-specific sunrise and sunset times
meaning it will automatically adjust itself anywhere I am in the world.
Whenever I have my computer with me, I also have this clock.
I started this project more than two years ago
as a way to better understand my own experience of living in a big city
and feeling profoundly disconnected from daylight.
I've gone through many transitions since starting this project,
but this daylight clock has continued to offer a daily subtle reminder
to slow down and connect to the moment and the place that I'm in.
Living with this clock, I've become deeply aware
of how my body responds to the changing seasons;
how in the spring as the days get longer I have this burst of energy,
and the opposite happens in the fall.
So rather than living with the same patterns and pace
every single day of the year,
my life has developed a flexibility and fluidity
that honors these greater cycles I'm a part of.
Technology adds so much to our lives, but it also really complicates our lives.
And in the course of human history, this change has happened really fast.
Most of us don't think twice before adopting a new piece of technology.
We don't consider how it will impact our relationships,
our communication, our bodies.
And today we need technology
to solve the problems created by technology.
(Laughter)
I'm not saying that cities are bad or clock time should be rejected.
Incredible progress has been made possible because of these things,
but for technologists and designers,
there's an opportunity to build objects and tools
that help us slow down
and celebrate the human experience in a more authentic way.
As much as we've been conditioned to believe that time is a linear thing,
the experience of time is not linear at all.
We think of a day as 24 hours,
but this measure doesn't reflect how we actually live our lives.
Life exists as meaningful moments.
And we feel time through shared interactions,
emotional connections and transcendent moments.
The experience of time is a uniquely personal thing
and it's something that could never be bound to a singular linear idea.
For me, building this daylight clock was just one way of investing
in my own subjective experience of time.
And for most of us, in order to live a modern life,
we have to embrace clock time,
but that doesn't mean we should forget
all of the elegant expressions of time in nature.
Nature was once the biggest public clock, we've just stopped paying attention.
Time is an infinite and beautiful thing.
And rather than feeling a desire to overcome it,
let us expand our understanding of time
and let that dictate how we spend our moments on Earth.
Thank you.
(Applause)