time machines

The studio explored the idea of time as a potential medium within the designer’s palate. The brief asked for a device able to measure and describe time through unconventional methods. No clock’s hands, no calendars, no numbers, but new meaningful cues able to represent the passing of life. The artefacts produced could be digital, analogue, human powered, powered by nature, or electric. They could focus on a single action or a single feeing. They could be useful or useless; universal, customizable or strictly personal. The design could be for something that could be time consuming or time saving, but it had to represent time in a meaningful way.

At the heart of the studio was a collaborative project, an intense forty-eight hour period in which a design project was developed by students from different countries as it circulated the globe.  Working in eight-hour shifts, art and design students from across the world responded to the work that was sent to them and continued to extend its evolutionary growth. The universities involved were RMIT University Interior Design, Australia; VCU Qatar Master of Fine Art Design, Doha; and Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Sculpture and Extended Media, USA.

Each group involved in the design cycle were free to modify, upgrade and refine the design they received and then pass their changes to the next group in the cycle. The groups received the work from the previous group at nine o’clock in the morning (local time) and had to develop and produce a designed response to the original design and post it by five o’clock that afternoon. In this way the design process was held in a constant present, as the evolving design encountered three working days in one, as all the twenty-four hours in one day were used to develop the project.