Friday 15 April 2011

Joyas Voladoras

An inspirational piece of writing about the heart and its lifetime:


"Joyas Voladoras" by Brian Doyle

Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.

Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmetcrests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant's fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.

Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles -- anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures more than any other living creature. It's expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.

The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It's as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest mammal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.
Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

Friday 4 March 2011

the three final briefs

The prototype presentation has helped me point out some key points in developing my final year project:
1. Pragmatic VS Poetic: It's good to experiment with both numbers and qualities of time, but this may at the end confuse my user. At the moment I've barely started prototyping yet and so would not rule out my pragmatic ideas completely, but use them as a background to developing behind the scenes detailing of possible outcomes.
2. Forget about the Day. Focus on ongoing timeframes. Imagine if you were to take this project into space where the day can no longer be defined by 24 hours. How would this project be able to adapt to this change? Afterall, my project is about opposing the standardized notions of time completely.
3. What is your aim at the end of the project?

From these pointers I've reviewed my 3 briefs:

Brief 1: Biological Time
This time is recorded by your heartrate. A device will be flashing and indicating your heartrate, whilst in the background it logs the data of your pulse. This data is then translated into a graphic.. kind of like a modern ECG that is plotted on endless time, pointing out events from your everday which caused the increases or decreases of heartrate. This is more an accumulation of time.. the longer the user puts this object to use, the more complex the graphic becomes. The object itself will look like an LED heart that flashes in relation to your heartbeat. Possibilities include: the flashing light itself wearing out over time, and requiring the user to "recharge" it (still unsure by what)

Brief 2: Emotional Time
This time is meant to play with the notion of memory and time. This object will represent how memory seemingly exists in our mind as something that has been afixed by ourselves. When infact, each time we revisit a memory, it somehow changes. A single sentence, repeated in the mind several times, can bring different meanings and evoke different emotions everytime. This object captures a memory, however over time will start to evolve everytime the user visits it. Like a memory you want to hold on to, but the harder you try, the less "genuine" it becomes.

Brief 3: Comparative Time
This time is not meant to be controlled. It is not meant to be recorded and it is not meant to tell the future. What it does is it represents the natural flow of time. Time does not wait. Time does not rush. It comes and goes as it wishes and although its variables may change, it keeps moving. This object will contain a set of parameters that allow a free formation of what would become of the object itself.

At the end of this project, I'd like to design a manifesto. This is a manifesto that speaks through my objects and through a narrative medium (film or book) about the endless possibilities of what time could be.

Friday 28 January 2011

the modern time-keeper

the marathon is finally (half) over!
BA(Hons) Design final year dissertation:

The Modern Time-keeper



My dissertation investigates and questions the modern approach of timekeeping. Its aim was to trace the roots of what time is. Divided into three sections, it conjures how the meanings of time can run in parallel:

60 seconds investigates how in the modern society, time is the ultimate ruler whereby systematic timekeeping has imposed a form of tyranny on society by forcing our surrender to the authority of the clock. The following two chapters are the counter arguments of our modern notion of time and is the inspiration of my project so far.

15 breaths explores the theories of time, comparing and contrasting the theories of relativity, time as an internal instinct and time as a learnt memory.

65 heartbeats explores the book Einstein’s Dreams which narrates the portrayal of the nature of time other than the number on the clock in 30 different worlds.

Sunday 9 January 2011

what's the walking speed of your city?


I came across an interesting article by the NewScientist which discusses the "walking speed" of some of the top cities of the world. People from 32 countries were timed walking a length of 18m. To my surprise, London is ranked at top 12 only, at 12.17secs. ... Hong Kong wasn't even a candidate but I believe it would've made a tie with Taipei at number 23, with 14secs.

While writing my dissertation, I've tried to retrace my roots in my interest in the topic of "Time". Having briefly discussed this during one of the mentoring sessions last term, I realized that my sensitivity to Time probably originated from having lived in two different countries. Having been away from Hong Kong for the past 3 years (although with visits back home for 6-10 weeks/year), I've really come to notice the difference in speed in different cultures.

London may have the 12th fastest walking pace in the world, but it doesn't necessarily mean the city itself functions at the same rate. In fact, I realized that my walking pace does increase in London compared to when I'm in Hong Kong. And yet I still feel that Hong Kong functions so much faster. Whether it is transportation, service or simply immediate gratification of your demands... Hong Kong is truly unbeatable!

(original article on "walking speed":
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/shortsharpscience/labels/walk.html)

Tuesday 28 December 2010

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?

Tuesday 14 December 2010

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?

Friday 26 November 2010

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