Coming from a city that never sleeps, I've grown up with a fast-paced, round the clock and immediate lifestyle. In Hong Kong, you barely have to wait for anything. Miss the train? Doesn't matter, the next will arrive within 2 minutes. Hungry at 4 in the morning? Order take-away and it arrives at your doorstep within 20 minutes. I would say I've taken this kind of lifestyle for granted and never really saw it as something worth taking note of.. until I moved to London.

Many people would say London is incredible... life is on high-speed and things can't be done any quicker, you can't get from one place to the other any faster.. and when I tell them that actually, London only really functions at what I would say around 70% of the speed of Hong Kong they look at me as if I'm completely out of my mind. Truth is, London was relatively slow for me when I first moved there. I couldn't believe how long I had to wait for buses, how long it took for my food to arrive, how long it took to pay for something. But it seems like I've slowly grown accustomed to the speed, slowly adapted to having more patience.

Now that I'm back at home I realize how serious this high-speed syndrome actually is. The day I arrived in Hong Kong, I was again amazed at the time it took for me to land, get off the plane, get through customs and reach the baggage hall. Normally this would take around 10 to 20 minutes depending on where the gate was. I reached the baggage hall well within 15 minutes and expected to be leaving with my baggage in the next 10 minutes or so. When I reached the conveyor belt, there was already a sign saying "BA27- Baggage delays due to technical problems. We apologize for any inconveniences caused". Compared to my nightmare in heathrow 5 days ago when I waited with no announcements at all for 10 hours for my "delayed" flight which never even happened at the end, this was literally like heaven. It took the airport staff less than 10 minutes to get their act together and inform passengers of the delay.. of their BAGGAGES.
10 minutes passed and the conveyor belt was still empty. An announcement about baggage delays was made soon after but people were already starting to get impatient. Eventually after almost an hour of waiting, we were informed that they are still having problems and that we should leave our contacts and the baggages would be sent to us to our home address. I thought to myself... well, luckily I have most of what I need either on me or at home anyway.. so a week without my baggage should be fine. It was then that I overheard one of the airport staff telling passengers that their luggage should be sent to them by midnight or tomorrow morning at the latest. I was so surprised I thought I heard the wrong thing. If this were London, my baggages would get to me in 2 weeks if I were lucky. So I happily filled in my details and left the airport, feeling blessed that I'm home again at the worlds most efficient city. But actually, this was just the beginning. As everyone knows about BA, there's always a delay with them. Flights, baggage, whatever. So although they said they'd deliver by midnight or the next morning, everyone doubted it would actually happen. And it didn't.. my baggage arrived around 30 hours after my arrival. But during those 30 hours, my mum was constantly calling BA to ask when my baggage would be arriving and my dad was constantly complaining about their poor management. This whole situation even managed to get itself on the news where people complained that their baggage weren't delivered to them within the expected time frame! I almost couldn't believe it... whether Hong Kong has evolved into some insatiable and spoilt city or whether I have just regressed and expected less out of this so-called "efficiency" of a city.. I'm not sure.

But this whole personal experience has made me think about what I would like to write for my contextual report. Thinking about the 24-hour society, how has this made an impact on lifestyles and consequently on design itself? Has the development of the 24-hour society been the outcome of human's never-ending demands and is design feeding this act of over-demanding and over-consuming lifestyle?

potential topics for contextual report:

personal time:
-expressing time through objects:
historical objects, personal items, photographs
objects as an indicator of time

mechanical time:
-60 seconds=?

mix of both:
the value of time.. are we slowly losing this through our 24 hour society?

4 mini briefs

1. Slowing down time vs. Speeding up time
-ways of showing time in slow motion and in fast forward. go for extremes
-personal experiences of how different countries/nations perceive time: Hong Kong, London, Munich, Taipei
-possible medium: film?

“Clocks and watches are now far more accurate than we need them to be in our daily lives... Perhaps this need to be in possession of the exact time reflects some fault in our perception of the world, and a defect in our grasp of space-time. Obsessive attention to microscopic detail is usually a symptom of underlying neurosis. Confident people carry neither money nor watches, and expect the world to keep time with them.”
- JG Ballard

2. Einstein's Dreams
-designing 30 objects that can work as time measuring devices in these 30 different worlds

3. Time frames
-further exploring the use of photography as a medium for capturing time frames for different people
-disposable camera that can be rewound and reused
-find 2 people with different relationships:
eg. 2 people who are in the same career, family members living in different parts of the world,

4. Ways of physically capturing time
-further development of roses immersed in resin

24hrs

how much can you do in 24hours?
mapping a day where i recorded everything i did and the duration of each event:



i did this by creating a grid system that divides into 24 sections by which i can "fill in" with the events of the day:

roses are red, violets are blue..

have been trying to explore ways of bringing time to a standstill in our physical world. so as a starting point, i bought a bouquet of white roses and painted them in resin to record each stage of their growth.

mixed feelings about the outcome so far.. the resin took a while to dry out completely, which i suspect has caused the roses themselves to wilt faster than the resin could "freeze" them in time. so some of the roses do look more dead than they do alive.. which wasn't what i was hoping for!

i do think though this unexpected result isn't entirely disappointing. i suppose then it in a way shows how time that isnt captured fast enough just dies. very literally.


also i found the resin a bit too thickly painted on. i don't really like that kind of aesthetic quality it creates as it feels very artificial and also it's a bit to shiny for my liking. so taking these points on board, i've made a few alterations of my "freezing" process:


the roses will now be submerged in the vase of water as opposed to hung and dried in mid-air. perhaps then while the resin is drying on it, the flower can still breath and is alive. the resin coating is also thinner..

treasure each moment

recently I've experienced things that have changed me into a completely different person. my priorities list was unbalanced and I've neglected what should've mattered to me the most. it was only until a couple of days ago that I realized what has become of me and my life.. which sparked this whole idea of "treasure each moment". I still can't get over this quote by Tennessee Williams:

"Has it ever struck you…that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by so quickly you hardly catch it going"

it is in a way very sentimental, very melancholy. very sad that each moment that passes by is so fast that you simply cannot grasp it in your hands. it is out of your control and it is what makes time beautiful in a sense that one moment in time can never be lived twice.

it scares me that i'm changing topics now but it took a lot of courage to do so as well! now i can only hope that i'll be able to catch up with things and gain more insight into the direction that i want to be going with my final year project.

what i want to investigate now besides the theories behind time (circadian clock, biological clocks, the solar system etc..) is how to capture the essence of time. are we able to capture a moment in time? is there something more substantial, more thought-provoking than simply photographs?

list of things to do and places to go to:
-live a day without knowing the time.. this would require more preparation than the actual experiment! will have to cover all clocks around the house and find a way to remove the time off my phone..
-visit National Maritime Museum
-ways of "capturing time" in nature: perhaps buying a bouquet of flowers and recording their every stage of life by "freezing" them in resin?
-visit Kew Gardens
-look into Einstein's theories of time
-create my own mini time measuring devices

what is TIME..?

"Has it ever struck you... that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going?"
-Tennessee Williams

This quote has really got me thinking.. about Time.
What is Time? Something which we live by everyday... which our lives revolve around. Is Time merely a number? A date? An hour?

Time at present is a number. Yet Time in the past is a Memory.

Time is marked by Memories. Memories chart every stage of your life and lets us have a past.

“We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories. Some take us forward, they're called dreams.”
-Jeremy Irons

We don't remember days or times... we remember moments in time.
What would be a way of capturing moments in time that is more than just numbers? More than just an hour on the clock, a date on the calendar?

"Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past even while we attempt to define it, and, like the flash of lightning, at once exists and expires."
-Charles Caleb Colton