Service Design in the 4th dimension by Anchit Som

Service Design in the 4th Dimension

Figure 1.0 Persistence of Memory 1

‘Salvador Dalí. The Persistence of Memory. 1931 | MoMA’, The Museum of Modern Art <https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79018> [accessed 13 May 2021].

Abstract “What time is?” would be an interesting research question however my exploration is not about this singular truth but about “What realities do the different perceptions of time afford us?”

The essays look at the different ways time is understood currently. Exploring notions of temporality from a psychological, experience, cultural, sociological and philosophical perspective. A major thesis among all the essays is that time is socially constructed and designers have a responsibility in its eventual creation/transformation.

I hope to ground my research in empirical findings, scientific knowledge and certain accounts of my own lived experiences.2 The self-referential nature of the essays arise from my own shifting conceptions of time. Speculative Storytelling is also of importance in this piece, as a method of artistic expression and imagination.

Through this portfolio, I hope to provoke and create new temporal understandings that practitioners can include as a core aspect of their design practice.

Keywords : Temporality, Routine, Perception, Future, Design

Heewon Chang, Autoethnography as Method, Bibliovault OAI Repository, the University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Table of Contents

Abstract

List of Figures

Multiplicities of Time Perception Shape of Time Designing Design

The Great Temporal Famine

5 8 11 14

Social Acceleration Day in the life Of Routines Temporalities Reborn

21 24 28 34

Time Travelling Designer

March 2021 March 2121 March 1621

40 47 52

List of Figures Figure 1.0 Persistence of Memory

Multiplicities of Time

Figure 1.1 Schematic Attention Gate Model

Figure 1.2 Shape of the Week

Figure 1.3 Double Diamond

Figure 1.4 Three triangle framework

Figure 1.5 Systemic Design Framework

Figure 1.6 Creative Process Representation

The Great Temporal Famine

Figure 2.1 Acceleration Cycle

Figure 2.2 My Day in a Life

Figure 2.3 Naturalisation Cycle

Time Travelling Designer

Figure 3.1 Steampunk Victorian London

Figure 3.2 Present Day London

Figure 3.3 Climate Crisis London

Multiplicities of Time GMT was introduced with the advent of services like transportation and communication, it brought in order and social regulation that governs our lives today.3 This short benign history of how time came to be hides a history of colonial oppression that replaced lunar calendars of centuries old with Gregorian calendars that slaves had to abide by to the minute. We still think of imperialism as a conquest for territory the same way we think of Capitalism as a scramble for money without realising idioms like “Time is Money” are socially constructed despite the scientific status we accord to time.

Universalised notions of time have become so ingrained that we hardly question the effect it has on the services and products we design. We limit ourselves when we assume that time means or feels like the same thing for every person. What if we looked at time differently, in fact what if we just looked at time instead of measuring it. In a thought experiment Bruno Latour looks at two twin travellers taking two different routes to a conference, one going through a jungle while another taking the train (both take 2 hours).4 The first traveller cuts through fallen trees, hides from predators on the way and incurs some scars for showing around in a dinner party. The other traveller sits on a posh carriage, with a newspaper and a coffee perhaps, waiting for the destination to arrive. While the first traveller experiences time in a range of emotions that the external stimulus provides, the second traveller finds an abstract time, in fact a mere measurement that tells him how near he is where he 3

Paul Huebener and others, ‘Exploring the Intersection of Time and Globalization’, Globalizations, 13.3 (2016), 243–55 <https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2015.1057046>. 4 Bruno Latour, ‘Trains of Thought The Fifth Dimension of Time and Its Fabrication’, Bruno Latour, 15.

needs to be. Bruno argues that the first traveller ages in his journey while the second one remains consistently grumpy at railway service. This relationship between stimulus, age and time is not just found in philosophical experiments, it is found in our biologies too.

“I liked it when I was a child and we had summer vacations.” “Why so?” “It felt like time passed slower when I was a child, summer seemed to last forever , funnily enough I yearn for Summer of 02” “Why can’t you have a Summer of 20, what stops you” “I don’t know man, now it feels like everything happens too fast, my life is slipping away like sand through my fingers.”

“I get you man, I used to look forward to weekends as a child, but now it’s just meh. I’ll waste a Saturday to rest, a Sunday to finally feel like myself and then it’s Monday again”

In a study on this phenomenon Professor Adrian Bejan points out that the rate at which we process visual information slows down as we age which results in us perceiving fewer ‘frames-per-second’, making us feel like time is speeding up.5 While when we are young, each second of "actual time" has many more mental images, our minds work like a slow motion camera, feeling each passing moment with even more jest. 5

‘No, It’s Not Just You: Why Time “Speeds up” as We Get Older’, Science in the News, 2019 <http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2019/no-not-just-time-speeds-get-older/> [accessed 29 October 2020].

The study uses the term "actual time" to put its point across but can an "actual time" even exist if everyone's experience of time is this subjective.

In the design of services, there’s a number of scenarios where this marked difference between "Actual" & "Perceived” difference can drastically affect customer experience

An airport in Houston was faced with a large number of complaints from passengers who found themselves waiting endlessly for their baggage to arrive.6 While the staff tried to solve it by adding more staff, the wait time was still a not-so-sweet 8 minutes. After several more rounds of complaints, the team tried a different approach; they extended the pathway leading to the baggage belt and the passengers now had to walk 6 minutes to get there. The shorter “perceived” wait time of 2 min made the complaints drop to zero and Houston has not had a Baggage Belt problem ever since. What if we could make the twin traveller’s train ride feel less like the passing of time and more like a journey? What if we could design a world that eliminates Monday Morning Blues and works to provide the Childlike Summer we yearn for?

Daniele Catalanotto, ‘Make Me Busy When I Wait’, Medium, 2019 <https://service-design.co/make-your-customers-busy-during-the-waiting-time-ad8a8e7e9172> [accessed 26 October 2020].

Perception Despite the social construction of time, our brains still have an innate ability to grasp the passing of time. We live in cycles of day and night with our body looking for thermal and solar cues to regulate metabolic processes. In a recent psychology experiment, participants were woken up from their sleep and asked to tell the time. 7

Surprisingly enough, the majority of participants could tell the time somewhat

accurately, while the ones who couldn’t came with an inability to tell time in their waking hours as well. The experiment not only points to human ability in telling the time, it also points to the margin of error we allow for when we calculate time. It makes one wonder, what exactly leads to this variability in measurement, shouldn’t time be universal. Perhaps the answers for extreme variability could only be found in a study of extreme users of the service of time.

Psychologist Matthew Bloome notes that depressed patients report a slowing down of time, 40 seconds feels like a minute to them. This stretching of time follows from the collapsing of the past and present into one continuous melancholic mood. On the contrary, Professor Katy Lubia finds that children with ADHD live wholly in the present with 3 seconds getting over way sooner than it should. This speeding up effect is so powerful that some psychologists now use it to diagnose ADHD with a 70% accuracy. 8

It’s not just diagnosable conditions but simple everyday emotions that can have a drastic effect on our perception of time. When facing a stressful situation, we recall 7

Claudia Hammond, Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception (Canongate Books, 2012). Hammond.

every single detail in a vivid richness captured by our memory. Skyjumper Chuck Berry remembers each minute decision he made in a near death fall that lasted a mere 9 seconds. Certain research participants recall looking at a scary spider for at least 45 seconds whilst in actuality it was shown for just 20 seconds.9 This emotional stretching of time extends to many services we design, a hungry diner often feels that the food is taking too long to be prepared despite the app showing them that the order is reaching them in record time. There’s a whole host of factors that can affect time perception ranging from Emotions, Age, Isolation to Body Temperature and even rejection. This list of factors only gives a designer the “What to manipulate ?”, for a “How to manipulate?”, one must look deeper into the mechanisms by which the brain measures time itself.

Figure 1.1 Schematic Attention Gate Model10

In 1995, Zakay and Block proposed the Attention Gate Model in an attempt to unify all theories of time distortion and internal clocks into one neat diagram.11 It affirms that the mind counts pulses (heartbeat) however it also adds an attentional gate that controls the number of pulses that can enter the mind’s pulse counter. When

Hammond. ‘Figure 1. Schematic of the Attentional Gate Model (AGM).’, ResearchGate <https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Schematic-of-the-attentional-gate-model-AGM_fig1_232702505> [accessed 12 May 2021]. 11 Dan Zakay and Richard A Block, ‘An Attentional·Gate Model of Prospective Time Estimation’, 7. 10

attention is directed to temporal processing, more pulses come through and one feels the passing of time more intimately. On the contrary when attention is devoted to non-temporal processing, fewer pulses pass leading to the stretching and speeding up effects we saw earlier.

Our brain never measures time in absolutes hence attention is the single most important factor in creating a relative measure of time. When we observe a pot boiling, it might look like the water is taking ages however if we swiftly shift our attention to checking an email, the water magically starts overflowing off the pan. In fact boredom is often attributed to us paying too much attention to time itself. This also confirms Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi's theory of flow wherein an individual fully immersed in an intrinsically rewarding activity(e.g. playing a sport or painting) loses track of time.12 Since flow activities live in the non-temporal information processing zone, the brain’s attentional resources are taken away from estimating time and put into the more worthwhile endeavours.

The Attention Gate Model explains most of the cases we’ve discussed so far, right from the traveller who gets restless in the train, to diverting airport passengers through a different route. Interestingly enough, the two examples also tie in another physical quantity along with time, distance. The intermingling of space and time is not unknown, we often talk about a train station being 5 minutes away or road being jammed for an hour ahead. Time exists in the 4th dimension, but we’re 3

Associate Professor Department of Psychology and Research in Education Shane J. Lopez PH.D and others, Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2009).

dimensional beings, perhaps we can look at time in the perceptible 3rd Dimension for some insights.

Shape of Time Claudia Hammond asked people to visualise the months of the year and a variety of results came out. Some saw a flattened oval, some saw horseshoe shapes. When asked about visualising the days in a week, the variety got even more interesting with a particular person marking the week like this13 -

Figure 1.2 Shape of the week 14

This particular visualisation is a signifier of how our current industrial systems of 9-5 shape our perceptions of time. Many participants drew linear block shaped diagrams owing to their indoctrination in school timetables, planners and diaries. Despite the norm, there are a few rebels in our world who yearn to imagine time differently and unlock temporal abilities unknown to most. Memory champion Ed Cooke visualises each day as an object or phenomena in the world. Monday could Hammond. Hammond.

13 14

be a car, Tuesday a lion, Wednesday a tree, Thursday a human body, Friday a plane15. This specific categorisation allows him to memorise his weekly schedule much more smoothly than other people would. Monday could begin at 8am at the car's headlights and the car exhaust would be 8 pm. One might imagine a yogi sitting on a lion’s mane to remember a Tuesday workout session. These metaphors define our relationship with time, and designers often utilise these shapings to align stakeholders with their practice.

Visualisation aside, language is another tool humans have been using to create different shapes of time. What contributes to this multiplicity is the diversity of languages that exist on earth. Many languages borrow from each other, while others evolved in far away lands creating incomprehensible yet unique meanings to phenomena. Ask the most proficient translator to translate the Japanese word “Majime” into English and you would find them struggling with Zen Metaphysics.

Leah Boroditsky studied the difference between Mandarin and English speakers in their association with time and their metaphors lead to vastly different conceptions. An English speaker might say “let’s put this event behind us” or reply to an email with “Looking forward to hearing from you”.16 While at first glance, these might seem like universal sentences, yet they refer to time existing in a horizontal plane for the anglophone. On the contrary, Mandarin speakers use vertical metaphors where earlier events are ‘shang’ or up and later events are “xia”or down. This difference is 15

Ed Cooke, ‘Total Recall: Memory Grandmaster Ed Cooke Shows You How to Apply Memory Techniques to the Office’, The Guardian, 2008 <http://www.theguardian.com/money/2008/oct/18/workandcareers-psychology> [accessed 9 May 2021]. 16 Orly Fuhrman and others, ‘How Linguistic and Cultural Forces Shape Conceptions of Time: English and Mandarin Time in 3D’, Cognitive Science, 35.7 (2011), 1305–28 <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01193.x>.

not just semantic, when asked to lay down the future and past in a 3D plane, English speakers would draw a straight line parallel to the ground, while Mandarin speakers slash across a line parallel to the wall. Patterns in language have both immediate and long-term consequences for how we conceptualize this fundamental domain of experience.

This difference can also arise within the same language, often in the same sentence. Consider the following statement “Next Wednesday’s meeting has had to be moved forward by two days.”

If asked what day is the meeting now, you might answer Monday however you could also answer Friday depending on how you view your relationship with time. For the Monday camp, they might imagine time to be a conveyor belt with the future moving towards them while the Friday ones are a bit more egoistic as they see time as a line with themselves moving towards the future.17 To add a little more flavour, your own intuitive answers might change depending on the situation you’re put in. Psychologist Leah Boroditsky asked this question to people who were queuing up for lunch and found that most people answered Monday. These hungry people associated time with waiting for their turn to get food. On the contrary, when she asked people disembarking a train, the answer was a resounding Friday, as they were moving towards their destination18. Are you approaching christmas or is christmas approaching you? Have you passed the deadline or is the deadline passing you? Questions with no definitive answers, only perspectives. 17

Hammond. Lera Boroditsky and Michael Ramscar, ‘The Roles of Body and Mind in Abstract Thought’, Psychological Science, 13.2 (2002), 185–89 <https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.00434>.

Designing Design Attention, Emotion, Visualisation, Language are all pertinent in shaping one’s experience of time. We could swiftly apply these to our services to and claim victory in designing for temporality. Yet we wouldn’t be able to achieve any of it if we don’t address the temporal bias afflicting most of Service Design - the double diamond.

Figure 1.3 Double Diamond19

Developed by the British Design Council, the framework was created to showcase the problem solving ability of design and its eventual manifestation across time20 The diamond evokes a certain sense of time bound exploration akin to school calendars allowing for a phased out delivery of design projects. It utilises language and shape to create a certain perspective on how time flows in the process. There 19

Maciej Lipiec, ‘Beyond the Double Diamond: Thinking about a Better Design Process Model’, Medium, 2019 <https://uxdesign.cc/beyond-the-double-diamond-thinking-about-a-better-design-process-model-de4fdb902cf > [accessed 13 May 2021]. 20 Cat Drew, ‘The Double Diamond: 15 Years On’, Design Council, 2019 <https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/double-diamond-15-years> [accessed 13 May 2021].

are four major phases namely Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver with outputs from each phase leading onto the next. The framework has been a major force in aligning designers and non-designers towards a common mission. Unfortunately, it is marred by the same shortcomings that the industrialisation of time brings, universalisation. While it helps that we have a universal definition like the GMT is, it doesn’t help when we fail to acknowledge that time isn’t experienced the same way. No project is the same, no two designers are the same. Why should their process be.

Creating a universal shape, creating a universal description for each phase limits our exploration in what could be. Design is not a linear process, in reality projects are much more fluid with many disciplines like digital design starting with the prototype in the first phase itself. There have been numerous instances where designers have had to “go back to the beginning” simply because the second diamond wasn’t enough to address the delivery problem in design.

The Design Council report preceding the double diamond mentions only manufacturers with no reference to the software industry.21 This has led to a major temporal skewing towards the rhythms of industrial manufacturing as opposed to the realities of technological development today. It points to a certain hubris of designers in defining the vision with engineers staved off like builder robots at the end whose inputs aren’t considered. These temporalities are constructed and they can very well be questioned. 21

Leon Gauhman, ‘Ditch the Double Diamond’, Medium, 2019 <https://medium.com/elsewhen/ditch-the-double-diamond-7e7b5ded36a9> [accessed 13 May 2021].

Designer Maciej Lipiec proposes a three triangle framework for design shifting the outputs of design from brief to actual concepts. 22

Figure 1.4 Three triangle framework23

The shape of the triangle and its layout points to Discovery and Ideation stages running simultaneously, as opposed to one after each other. It also represents the time spent on projects more accurately as it creates the largest triangle for delivery, the longest, most difficult part.

Over the years, the design council has also realised the limitations of their own framework. There is an acknowledgement of the multiplicity of temporal 22

Lipiec. Lipiec.

experiences with an intent of segmenting audiences based on how they view the design process.

In a recent publication, the council proposed a systemic design approach to reflect the current state of the design process.24 While it has phases like the previous one, they are not strictly demarcated and are represented by a wave that could go “any which way” based on a designer’s individual process and the project. Instead of just two neat demands, the framework is cyclical with a repeating “Research, Ideate, Prototype, Implement” throughout the framework allowing for repeated iterations on the concept.

Figure 1.5 Systemic Design Framework

Going from the double diamond to the systemic design framework took an odd 15 years and one must note that this might change in time too. Designing for the subjective experience of time requires acknowledging that the experience of time 24

Cat Drew, ‘Developing Our New Systemic Design Framework’, Medium, 2021 <https://medium.com/design-council/developing-our-new-systemic-design-framework-e0f74fe118f7> [accessed 13 May 2021].

shall never be static. If we have to design for a childlike summer or a marvellous train journey, we must craft our own experience of time carefully enough to allow for these possibilities. In the spirit of reflection, here’s a quick snapshot of my own design process. Cheers!

Figure 1.6 Creative Process Representation25

DocOTaco, ‘The Creative Process’, R/Funny, 2013 <www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1m2799/the_creative_process/> [accessed 13 May 2021].

The Great Temporal Famine “I’m writing my Critical & Historical Studies essay on Emotional Design, it has three types - behavioral, visceral and reflective. You need to make some time for reflections buddy. Don’t do your CHS on a Sunday, live a little” - Riddhima

“I haven’t done anything and there’s a deadline on the 11th February, I have horrible planning skills and its backfiring now” - Me

“Why do you think that is?” Riddhima

We’re living in an age of abundance or a 24 hour society as some might call it. Graced by the technological advancements of labour-saving devices, we should have hacked time by now, have plenty of it to spend. Yet a common feeling of “time-scarcity” still persists, enough to have caused nihilism, anxiety and burnout in a young designer. These might be the symptoms of my CHS demise, however I’m still intrigued to know the disease at the root of this temporal problem.

As I contemplate asking for a deadline extension to my portfolio submission, it’s worth exploring structures and embedded notions of temporality that got me here and how it might be relevant for the design of services.

Social Acceleration Human temporal experience has shifted from the immediate growls of hunter gatherer stomachs to seasonal lifestyles of farming. While this shift took place over tens of thousands of years, the shift to industrialisation happened in just a few centuries. In fact the current landscape of social media applications hogging our attention are merely a decade old.

It seems like the time that it takes to change someone’s notion of time itself is shrinking. Eminent philosopher Harmut Rossa calls this the “Social Acceleration”26, he identifies three key dimensions of this perceived speeding up.

Technological Acceleration - This refers to the intentional, technical and machine-based acceleration brought on by technological advancement. A prime example of this is Moore’s law which states that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. In layman terms, computers are getting smaller and computing power ever more faster. Our pursuit of speed isn’t a secret, from horse carriages to the concorde, from snail mails to instant messaging. We’ve always aimed to bring the future closer to us, it's what we yearn for, it’s called Amazon Prime Now, not tomorrow, not day-after, Now.

Acceleration of Social Change - Changing Social beliefs and actions have a shorter and shorter period of validity and are frequently contemporaneous with other

‘On Hartmut Rosa and the Acceleration of Social Change in Modernity’, JHI Blog, 2019 <https://jhiblog.org/2019/01/23/on-hartmut-rosa-and-the-acceleration-of-social-change-in-modernity/> [accessed 10 February 2021].

beliefs and actions with which they are radically inconsistent. In one sense the current political climate is not simply a war of ideologies but also of temporalities. The 50 year old Working Class mill worker who lost his job to Globalisation is at odds with the millennial entrepreneur who’s putting macbooks in the hands of african kids. Beliefs don’t change uniformly but the rate at which they are changing is definitely increasing.

Until 1800, social change was largely intergenerational, one would usually work the same job their father did, however between 1800 and 1970, the change became generational, with the offspring choosing a different profession from their parent.27 As we enter 2021, changes have become intragenerational, one no longer holds a single profession, or works for the same employer, there’s a range of different lifestyles to try, like the switch I made from engineer to design student at the Royal College of Art.

Acceleration of Pace of life - it refers to the shortening or condensation of episodes of action. This acceleration is not as easy to notice as the other ones because of how intricately it's embedded in our lives. Yet it’s everywhere and it's hard to miss as soon as you start looking closely. An elaborate ceremony of tea-making replaced by the drab ritual of dipping your tea bags in hot water. A Sumptuous English Breakfast replaced by grab & go Pret-a-Manger for those getting late for office.

‘On Hartmut Rosa and the Acceleration of Social Change in Modernity’.

Figure 2.1 Acceleration Cycle 28

In the words of Harmut Rossa “It is as if we are standing on "slipping slopes," a steep social terrain that is itself in motion and in turn demands faster lives and technology.” 29

In the words of my ex girlfriend’s favorite singer John Mayer “Stop this train, want to get off and go home again, can’t take the speed it’s moving in, honestly won’t someone stop this train.”30

While Harmut Rossa proposes a generalisable framework to explain the “time famine”, it’s still not convincing enough for a deadline extension. I must investigate the exact socio-technical changes that led me to write this just a few hours before my deadline. Critical Theory is for sociologists, I’m a service designer with a caddy of design tools, it’s only fair to whip out one for this dissertation.

H. Rosa, ‘Social Acceleration: Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronized High–Speed Society’, 2003 <https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.00309>. 29 Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, New Directions in Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 30 John Mayer, Stop This Train, 2016 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UiX4dUUjWc&ab_channel=JohnMayer-Topic> [accessed 10 February 2021].

Day in the life The field of Service Design has been explicitly looking at people’s temporal experiences through the use of tools like Journey Maps or a Day in the Life. These tools are empathy building exercises that allow a Designer to spot gaps in service delivery and eventually find ways to improve them.

We might stake claim to this tool as unique to our practice, however the act of recording one’s day has been taking place for hundreds of years. In fact, Dale Southerton studied the difference in the schedule of a middle-income family in 1937 & 2000 in Brighton, UK to uncover how temporal structures have changed over 63 years.

In 1937, families lived in cycles of paid and unpaid work, while in 2000 families differentiated their lives in spheres of work and leisure. The days in 1937 were structured by habits that got passed on from one generation to another. On the other hand 2000 saw the arrival of pagers, annual planners hence an extra bit of time went to planning out the activities of the day. This intense Taylorisation led to people sequencing all aspects of their life including the social ones - terms like family-time and quality-time proliferated as opposed to it being embedded in the activities of the day. 1937’ers lived on coordinated social time, with specific bus timings and grocery schedules for a Sunday feast, on the contrary 2000 marked the rise of a middle class that could buy a car and stock up on food as they wished.31

Dale Southerton, ‘Re-Ordering Temporal Rhythms. Coordinating Daily Practices in the UK in 1937 and 2000’, Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture, 2009, 49–63.

Seeing such stark differences, it makes me wonder how my life in 2021 would compare to them. In an attempt to prevent the caffeine-driven frenzy I find myself in, I recorded the events of my life in London on a cold February day.

Figure 2.2 My day in the life

It’s 6:26 pm and my first insight from the day in the life exercise would be that I have a sleeping disorder exacerbated by my lack of willpower and cold weather. But to reach these insights and journal recordings, I didn’t have to jog my memory as much as look at timestamps of messages, card swipes, and search history. This creates a stark difference between 2021 and 2000, as for each activity done today there’s a record of its existence in a data server.

The blocking of time in leisure and work time of the 2000s has been replaced by an always available leisure device that can be used in short bursts. No longer do we have to be restricted to a 9-5, one can have an afternoon nap and work the evening 25

away. An increase in freelance and remote work would only enhance these new temporal rhythms of work.

The macro sequencing of social activities in the 2000s has been steadily replaced by an on-demand social experience that doesn’t require as much active engagement. While people still block out time to meet friends and family, the frequency and the commitment has definitely changed as a video call drastically cuts commute times.

I would’ve been harsher on myself for a bad sleep cycle but Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has conveniently taken that burden from me by declaring that their competitors involve Youtube, Hulu and Sleep.32 This is a new era of business strategy where companies are competing with activities in your schedule, pervading your senses with a screen in front of your face. The tech industry is infamous for making addictive products with design patterns akin to casino slot machines. Nir Eyal in his book Hooked describes a behaviour design model that can be used by any enthusiastic entrepreneur to create addicting products & services.33 Funnily enough, Nir Eyal now has a book called Indistractable which helps users get rid of their addictions.

What makes Silicon Valley technology dangerous is that it operates at a level of complexity that people do not immediately fathom. It uses big data, machine learning and predictive analytics to predict what you would want to watch or 32

‘Netflix Says Its Biggest Competition Is Sleep’, The Independent, 2017 <https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/netflix-downloads-sleep-biggest-competitio n-video-streaming-ceo-reed-hastings-amazon-prime-sky-go-now-tv-a7690561.html> [accessed 11 February 2021]. 33 Nir Eyal, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (Penguin, 2014).

engage with next. “To anticipate all outcomes in advance, to collapse the future into the present is to elide the space of becoming—the possibility for change”34. I’m spell-bound by an ever refreshing feed where algorithms make sure the spell is not broken lest I give in to sleep.

I think I have my answer. I blame the designers at Facebook and Google for making me procrastinate on my essay. If anyone has to be held responsible for the abomination it's Mark Zuckerberg.

“1500 words in and you’re already bashing big tech, don’t you think this is just you shifting your guilt onto them” - Pri “Why do you say that?” - Me “You’re an autonomous human being, you can choose to structure your life better. You have freewill to not use these applications” - Pri “Really? Do you consciously choose every single action in your life?” - Me “Yeah” - Pri “I don’t think so! I’m willing to write an entire section in this essay proving you wrong. ” -Me

Christine Lohmeier, Anne Kaun, and Christian Pentzold, ‘Making Time in Digital Societies: Considering the Interplay of Media, Data, and Temporalities—An Introduction to the Special Issue’, New Media & Society, 22.9 (2020), 1521–27 <https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820913555>.

Of Routines The word routine akin to its root word route is about making small paths in everyday life. Once a path is established, the moment of conscious choice is diminished, and actions are performed without second thoughts.35 While they may be tools to create certain temporal patterns, they are also hidden with cultural depth and meaning that often become subconscious.

“Go have a bath, I won’t give you breakfast before you clean yourself up” - Mother “I’ll have a bath after I eat, how does it even matter?” - Me “These are house rules, I’m not going to let you touch the food before you go into the shower” - Mother “I had a bath last night itself after my evening run, I don’t see the point of having one again, it’s not even been 12 hours since then.” - Me

“Suit yourself then. You can get breakfast from outside if this is the attitude you want to have” - Mother

While I’m still on the defensive about this sequencing debate, it certainly points to hidden layers of subconscious meaning. My family identifies with the Hindu religion which has strong ideas of what is considered pure and impure. So much so that, certain orthodox hindu households would rather have their excreta manure in open fields than put a filthy bathroom inside the house. Bathing before eating is a way to maintain purity since food is the sacred gift of gods. While calling this routine a 35

Orvar Löfgren and Ehn Billy, ‘Routines - Made and Unmade’, Time, Consumption and Everyday Life. Practice, Materiality and Culture., 2009, 99–114.

house rule implies a certain power structure that must be maintained by each passing generation.

My future wife’s favourite singer John Mayer expresses the conflict of this routine in his lyrics “How much of my mother has my mother left in me? Will I let this woman kill me, or do away with jealous love? Will I dim the lights inside me just to satisfy someone? Will it wash out in the water, or is it always in the blood?”36

----

Billy Ehn & Orvar Lofgren devised three polarities to understand the underlying meanings behind why we perform certain activities.37

The first one is around collective routines, habits or sets of shared principles that make society possible. In an interdependent complex technological world, routines are necessary for maintenance, order and repair. Even the seemingly mundane activities like taking out the garbage, travelling to work and sleeping are collective temporal processes with spin-off disciplines like waste, traffic management, and urban energy planning.

The second and third polarities lie in opposition, one proposing routines as self constraining activities that imprison you, the other looking at routines as a structures

John Mayer, John Mayer - In the Blood (Audio), 2017 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob-jS7bqYgI&ab_channel=johnmayerVEVO> [accessed 10 February 2021]. 37 Löfgren and Billy.

to organise your life. Controlled or be controlled, is the dichotomy that many of us find ourselves in, especially creatives seeking serendipitous inspiration for an essay.

Modernists Durkheim and Weber note that rational choice making is core to human nature, only animals and tribals engage in ritualistic behaviour.38 They describe a utopian modernity which liberates us from routine and allows us to choose who we really want to be. As romantic as this sounds, modern life still consists of mindless routines inculcated in us through various institutions like the school, church and technocratic governments. In fact, the practice of absolute autonomy might even be looked at as an evasion of duties rather than a bid for self discovery.

The dichotomy presents us with two histories, the first one celebrating modernity that freed us from our animalistic selves and made us higher order beings. The second one of industrialised society shackling our otherwise free to live bodies."Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!" exclaims Karl Marx in the communist manifesto.39

Fortunately, we don’t have to choose between the two arguments as we’ve entered late modernity where matters are a bit more nuanced. A shift from production based to consumption based society has made this a battle of choices. Moving us from “too little choice” to too “much choice”. The central problem of time famine arises not from crushing boredom but a higher density of events packed in a limited 38

Richard Wilk, ‘The Edge of Agency’, in Time, Consumption and Everyday Life, ed. by Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, and Richard Wilk, 1st edn (Routledge, 2020), pp. 143–54 <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003087236-13>. 39 Bob Blaisdell, The Communist Manifesto and Other Revolutionary Writings: Marx, Marat, Paine, Mao, Gandhi, and Others (Courier Corporation, 2003).

amount of time. If I look at my own schedule, there have been a number of instances where I chose to engage in non-purposeful activities, not because I didn’t have choices, but possibly because I had too many. The cynic in me would enthusiastically declare “Free will is an illusion, consumer culture is imprisoning us into routines that suit capitalism’s interests”. Yet ending this essay with my disdain for capitalism wouldn’t be fair to my exploration or even Adam Smith.

We don’t mindlessly adopt every passing fad that is advertised to us. Our habits and routines are inevitably an expression of who we are. How much autonomy we have is a separate philosophical inquiry, however on a conscious level, I do seem to like Instagram more than TikTok.

This barrier between controlling routines and being controlled by them is demarcated by a chasm of conscious thought and subconscious habit. Richard Wilk proposes an analytical model to explain this in his essay about routines and volition.40 Using Bourdieu’s terminology41, he differentiates the two realms of “Praxis” - conscious, and “Habitus” - subconscious. He further breaks down the absorption of new habits into “cultivation” and “naturalisation”.

Cultivation is the process by which unconscious habits & routines are brought into conscious reflection and discourse. It can be active or passive depending on whether the routine has been initiated by oneself or forced by an external figure. When learning how to drive a car, each brake pedal, gear shift and wheel maneuver 40 41

Wilk. Carlos Belvedere, ‘The Habitus Made Me Do It: Bourdieu’s Key Concept as a Substruction of the Monad’, 15.

is performed in the cultivation zone. in an attempt to not wreck the car. However within a few months, driving feels nature, as these habits and routines start slipping into the subconscious zone through Naturalisation. We perform many activities with naturalisation, brushing your teeth, eating our food, putting our keys on the table. It’s only when we can’t find the keys in the usual spot that the naturalised habit resurfaces into consciousness.

Figure 2.3 Naturalisation Cycle42

Naturalisation is the brain's way of saving up energy by memorising trivial choices and certain patterns of action. Often I find myself relaxed while driving a car, imagining and solving various puzzles in my head that I don’t get time for in my daily routine. Here we see that subconscious habits don’t necessarily constrain us, they might even liberate us to make more conscious decisions. In analysing patients of burnout syndrome, Lofgren points out the horrors of having to make every single decision consciously.43 Once the autopilot becomes conscious, life goes out of sync and the body refuses to obey orders. This sudden shift also occurs in people who are in the midst of extreme events like wars, natural disasters and pandemics. 42 43

Wilk. Löfgren and Billy.

Constant improvisations are needed to survive and the vulnerabilities of life that were once taken for granted start showing up.

On a more personal note, I write this in a global pandemic, having had to face multiple rounds of routinisation and de-routinisation. When the government lifts a lockdown and declares another one in less than a month, I’m faced with constant uncertainties that habits can’t keep up with. All my naturalisations start falling off when a computer screen replaces what my body was used to doing face-to-face. Routines fade in oblivion when I question the point of this drab existence while brushing my teeth.

With my “habitus-praxis” boundary in utter shambles, and technological addiction exacerbated by an accelerating pace of life. I have uncovered several ailments to my current situation, yet the famine exists ever stronger. Maybe it’s time to dig into our basic assumptions of the time and see if there’s a well with water somewhere.

Temporalities Reborn While you might not be solely responsible for what happens in your life, you could still change how you think about these events. We imagine our day’s activities to have rhythmic properties that amplify, enable or cancel out each other.

The conception of time is rooted in it being treated as a scarce resource wherein practices(activities) are both consumers and competitors. What if we could reverse this thinking and look at practices as creators of time. Time doesn’t exist independent of its observer, “it is the rhythm of social life that creates the category of time” - Durkheim.44

This might sound counterintuitive at first however let me remind you that time doesn’t exist objectively. It’s a social construct defined by how you think about it and measure it. Professor Allen Bluedorn points out “What any group of people think about time ends up being a result of them interacting with each other and socialization processes”. 45

We still have certain polychronic countries that treat time as cyclical as opposed to monochronic countries that look at time linearly. In practice, this difference means that a Britisher would believe that the passing second would never come back while

Elizabeth Shove, Everyday Practice and the Production and Consumption of Time, Time, Consumption and Everyday Life (Routledge, 2020), pp. 17–33 <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003087236-3>. 45 ‘Why Time Is a Social Construct’, Smithsonian Magazine <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-time-is-a-social-construct-164139110/> [accessed 10 February 2021].

an Iranian would not be filled with as much regret as each moment repeats itself and nothing gets lost in the universe.46

Shifting our perspective from the consumption of time to the production of it, opens us up to an entirely different way of reflecting on our routines. As I write this essay, I create time for it now and some more in the future to amend it. If I create time for deleting Instagram now, I create time in the future where I don’t look at a newsfeed. Each action has a ripple effect, the past - present - future don’t exist independent of each other.

The actions performed in autopilot by our subconscious brains are a result of us having created time for it in the past. For certain rituals like bathing before eating, time was created by priests hundreds of years ago for us to create the time to follow it in the present. Hence, the creation of time can affect events beyond one’s own lifetimes. While we can only reflect on the time created by those before us, we can certainly choose how we wish to create time now and in the future.

Instead of competing for people’s attention and slotting in services in people’s schedule, designers must think about how their services can create new temporalities for their users. When designing a bottle, one creates a time for its sale, a time for its usage and also a time for its eventual degradation. We must analyse all the temporalities to know for sure that we are designing for a world that we ourselves would like to live in. 46

‘Table 3: Monochronic and Polychronic Countries with Their Characteristics.’, ResearchGate <https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Monochronic-and-Polychronic-countries-with-their-characteristics_tbl2_47 81353> [accessed 11 February 2021].

My essay is almost over, and the deep sense of regret it began with has now vanished. I don’t look at my procrastination as time wasted but a creation of this time right now where I reflect on how I got here. Had I done my essay in time, my conclusions would have been wildly different. I might sound fatalistic yet this current moment has moved me to create time well in advance for my next submission. John Mayer says it better in his song “Moving on(reflecting) and getting over(creating) Are not the same, it seems to me”47

Famines exist because water is a scarce yet precious commodity, once you become a time alchemist, you’d never go thirsty.

John Mayer, John Mayer - Moving On and Getting Over (Audio), 2017 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0wBrJHd9-A&ab_channel=johnmayerVEVO> [accessed 11 February 2021].

Time Travelling Designer

Figure 3.1 Steampunk Victorian London48

March 1921 The last train from Charing Cross whizzed past as Mr. Chauntel held a chatter of metal plates in his hand. He walked away from the stock-jobbers homes in the City facing another rejection for his invention, what started as a hobby in designing radio sets has become an obsession in making a one of a kind listening and talking audio equipment.

‘Punking The Past: The Steampunk Aesthetic Of Victorian London In Superb Paintings Of Vadim Voitekhovitch’ <https://designyoutrust.com/2019/12/punking-the-past-the-steampunk-aesthetic-of-victorian-london-in-superbpaintings-of-vadim-voitekhovitch/?fb_comment_id=2699200403479722_2734299576636471> [accessed 13 May 2021].

“These supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies, they think Alexander Bell is a genius because he made the telephone. Wait till they see my invention, it communicates not spatially, but across time.” remarked Chauntel. He arrived at his home with the winter sun setting in the back, it was an exciting day for him as he had finally found the quartz crystal that would make his machine work. As he fit the quartz inside, the speaker started humming a light lull. “That’s odd, I haven’t connected it to a power source, how is this even making a sound.” said a surprised Chauntel. He checked the components again, changed the polarities around but the humming wouldn’t stop. As he started tuning the side meter, he realised “Maybe it's drawing from a power source some other timescape, bollocks, it's working”. After a few more rounds of tuning, the static noise gave way to some muffled voices and Chauntel bent forward towards the microphone and said “Hello, Can you hear me?”.

March 2021

Figure 3.2 Present day London49

“Honey, I just connected this radio thing to a power source, it has a recorded message that says hello” - Gerard “Why do you keep collecting all this garbage from the antique store? It’s 2021, no one has a use for a radio anymore” - Molly, Gerard’s wife “This one's special boo, it has a microphone attached to it, I’m assuming someone was trying to invent the telephone.” - Gerard “I beg your pardon, this is not a telephone, it’s a gramamicrophone.” - Chauntel

“Woah, this thing just talked to me, did someone record that into the radio as well.” - Gerard “It’s not the thing, it’s me Chauntel Dinkling talking to you from my new invention, the gramamicrophone. I made this to communicate across time, I reckon I've reached 30 years ahead.” Chauntel “Hey man! that’s a great telephone prank you got going on there Mr. Chauntel.” “Don’t you dare call this a telephone, it’s a gramamicrophone, the only one of its kind. That Alexander Bell is nothing without Hockney Marsh’s patents. Don’t know why they put him on the pedestal” Gerard does a quick search on all the names Mr. Chauntel mentioned and realises that he is accurately describing the telecommunication revolution of the 1890s “Holy cow, I’m talking to a man from the past. This radio is a time machine. Honey this radio is a time machine.”- Gerard “I told you not to have those drinks in the wee afternoon hours.” - Molly, Gerard’s wife “Tell me what is the future like?” - Chauntel “Umm.. It’s okay, we have smartphones which we spend a lot of time on, we have a pandemic going on so it’s a bit drab right now. Had to shut down markets and go outdoors.” - Gerard

“It sounds like you have the black death, that’s awful, I lost many of my family members to smallpox last year.. ” - Chauntel “Oh yeah, smallpox doesn’t exist anymore, we cured that with vaccines by Edward Jenner and I’m hopeful this pandemic will end with vaccines.” - Gerard “The British Empire and its miraculous science, tell me, do you have devices to look at the future too, how do you perceive time?” - Chauntel “To be honest, we don’t really look at the future, our structural capacities have been heavily skewed towards short-term thinking.” - Gerard “Really? I’m sure Physics would have advanced to a level where you can look into the future or even travel to it, I can’t be the only person doing this.” - Chauntel “Looking into the future and looking at the future are two different things. I’m not a physicist so I wouldn’t know how time works scientifically but I can assure you that our social construction of time is heavily biased towards the present.” - Gerard “Social Construction of time, very intriguing, Tell me more. ” - Chauntel “Well, the shrinking and slicing up of time is deeply embedded into our culture. In fact inventor Esther Dyson once said “In politics the dominant time frame is a term of office, in fashion and culture it’s a season. For corporations it’s a quarter, on the internet it’s minutes, and on the financial markets mere milliseconds”50” - Gerard

Indy Johar, ‘Futures in Long-Termism..’, Medium, 2020 <https://provocations.darkmatterlabs.org/futures-in-long-termism-16c1745c361c> [accessed 12 May 2021].

“Isn’t the division of time supposed to benefit us? Calendars, clocks, working hours, they allowed us to create order and societal systems amidst all the chaos.” Chauntel “You’re right in thinking that social construction serves a purpose but at the same time it's important to question whose purpose it serves. For instance policy-makers regularly use a technique called Social discounting to gauge the kind of impact their investments will have.51 If you’re weighing up whether to build an expensive sea-bridge to foster trade, it’ll tell you that a 5% boost in economic growth in 12 months is better than a 5% boost in 12 years. This short termism might benefit the policymaker because they get to delight their immediate voters with results but it could be heavily detrimental in the long term.” - Gerard “Politicians are all sleazy, yet I’m not against this “social discounting” idea. Instead of worrying about tomorrow, worry about the problems of today! It does seem like a more pragmatic way of living and pragmatism moves us forward.” - Chauntel “If we have to consider what’s pragmatic we must look at where pragmatic comes from. For the past few decades, Utilitarianism has been the dominant moral code of major western societies in rational decision making. It prescribes individuals to take actions that maximize happiness and well-being for all affected individuals in a society.”52 - Gerard

Richard Fisher, ‘The Perils of Short-Termism: Civilisation’s Greatest Threat’ <https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190109-the-perils-of-short-termism-civilisations-greatest-threat> [accessed 12 May 2021]. 52 Carla Tardi, ‘Utilitarianism Defined’, Investopedia <https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/utilitarianism.asp> [accessed 12 May 2021].

“Wait a minute, you just went on assuming that we all abide by the same morality. What if my moral code, my pragmatism is different from yours?” - Chauntel “There is a simple test to find out actually, imagine a train is rushing towards five men stuck on the tracks. You could pull a lever to move the train to another set of tracks however there’s another single person on this set of the tracks. Would you save the one or save the five?”53 - Gerard “I’ll save the five.” - Chauntel “You, my friend, like most people in Britain are utilitarian. You believe that the moral value of an action is not in its intrinsic nature, but rather in its consequences.” Chauntel “So its saying that one must act for the greater good” - Gerard “Precisely” - Chauntel “We already do that though, all our professions contribute to the greater good in some way. The engineers work to build ships that allow tradesmen to bring tea to merchants in London who sell it to me to enjoy a warm cuppa. That’s a lot of happiness maximisation happening in the present.” - Gerard “Whose happiness are you looking at has always been an interesting question. Did the colonisation of India look at the happiness of a growing British Empire, probably yes. But did it look at the happiness of natives, probably not. When using

Olivia Goldhill, ‘Philosophers Created a Morality Test That Gauges Utilitarianism Better than the Trolley Problem’, Quartz <https://qz.com/1196243/test-how-moral-or-immoral-you-are-with-this-utilitarian-philosophy-quiz/> [accessed 12 May 2021].

utilitarianism, one must ensure all consequences are measured and all sections of society included. Especially those marginalised and voiceless or perhaps the ones that haven’t been born yet .” - Gerard “Hold on, those not born yet! I could fathom you talking about natives, in fact I’m a supporter of the freedom struggle in many of our colonies but how would you even calculate or account for the unborn?” - Chauntel “I’m happy you’re considering the needs of a society larger and farther from your own, perhaps looking at the species across time might help you consider the unborn as well. For calculation’s sake, the average lifespan of any mammalian species has been at least a million years. While we’ve exhausted the first 300,000 of that, there’s still an enormous number of generations that are yet to come. We’re 7.64 Billion people on the planet right now and if we keep the current birth rates constant, we might be looking at 6.75 trillion people, 62 times more humans than have ever lived on this planet.54 If I gave you the trolley problem again with the lever to kill 6.75 trillion people or change your hedonistic ways to better the earth now, What would you pick?” - Gerard “I see your point and I do understand the need to consider a long-term thesis for our civilization but wouldn’t we neglect our people today if we do things only in the future..” - Chauntel “Long-Termism is not about what one must do, it simply points to what consequences matter the most. Perhaps the best way to help future generations 54

Richard Fisher, ‘Are We Living at the “Hinge of History”?’ <https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200923-the-hinge-of-history-long-termism-and-existential-risk> [accessed 12 May 2021].

would be to improve the lives of those in the present by providing them better health, education and opportunities for growth. The difference comes when we move away from short-term designing of our lives to long-term considerations of our actions.” - Gerard The grammamicrophone switched to static before Mr. Chauntel could further the conversation and the muffled voices were lost, never to return.

March 2121

Figure 3.4 Climate Crisis London

“Hi Gerard!” - Chauntel

“That’s my great-great grandfather, I’m Adam, I know who you are, Mr. Chauntel, He wrote about this encounter in his journals and we’ve been passing this grammamicrophone through our generations.” - Adam

“That’s wonderful, I’m still figuring out how to work this, it seems to whiz past time randomly.” - Chauntel

“I’m quite surprised this actually worked, my father almost sold it off thinking that his grandfather was hallucinating.” - Adam

“What year is it?” - Chauntel “It’s 2121.” - Adam “Marvelous, that’s 200 years ahead of me. What does the future look like? I can imagine flying cars, people settling on the moon.” - Chauntel

“Well, the situation is not the best really, we have some city completely submerged in water. We’re trapped inside our homes because there are heat waves outside. I’m living on an insect based diet because food supplies are in major shortage.” - Adam

“It’s astonishing that despite 100 years between you and your great grandfather, you both seem to be stuck inside your homes with major catastrophes around you. I would have assumed science & technology would have solved these issues.” Chauntel

“Perhaps it's technological determinism that ruined us, we created our own conceptions of how the world should work without paying heed to the natural temporalities of earth.” - Adam

“Natural Temporalities? Isn’t time socially constructed for our benefit or even the benefit of future generations?” - Chauntel

“That’s the issue, we put ourselves and our hubris at the centre of every social construction, we define an end and then everything is only a justification to that end. Natural temporalities are also a social construction but one that considers the

non-human, that allows us to think not in days & months but in eons and millenia55.” - Adam

“But we can only know time from when humans existed on earth, how can we even think about aeons?” - Chauntel

“Time might seem intangible at first but it does leave tangible traces all around us. While humans embody time in the objects of metal & concrete they create, the earth finds its embodiment of time in rocks, mountains and plateaus that exist despite us not because of us. If you touch a fragment of an ancient meteorite in a museum, you’re feeling metal that coalesced around the newborn Sun more than 4.5 billion years ago.56” - Adam

“How does knowing how old a rock is help us in any way?” - Chauntel

“When we start looking at rocks not as nouns but as verbs, we start observing geology as a process in time rather than a fixed object of exploitation.57 Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world is an event in time that started a million years ago. It’s the tallest mountain now, who knows what it might become of it in another million years” - Adam

Marcia Bjornerud, ‘Geology Makes You Time-Literate’, Nautilus, 2018 <http://nautil.us/issue/64/the-unseen/geology-makes-you-time_literate> [accessed 12 May 2021]. 56 Alexandra Witze, ‘A Tour of Deep Time Brings Comfort in Hard Times’, Nature, 591.7850 (2021), 363–64 <https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-00660-5>. 57 Bjornerud.

“What you refer to as exploitation might simply be survival, we forged new paths to civilization by taming nature, by creating order that supports our species.” Chauntel

“There seems to be a certain overconfidence about how we change our landscapes to shape our needs. I don’t question the endeavour for civilisation, I do question our ignorance of the effects our actions have on the ecosystems around us.” - Adam

“If the earth has existed before us and withstood the test of time, in the grand scheme of things our actions shouldn’t matter, right?”- Chauntel

“Not sure if you’re being a nihilist but you might be right when you say that these actions wouldn’t matter to the earth, they only matter to us. Our species evolved to recognise immediate existential threats rather than subtle, long-term and multi-generational changes. Yet the nature of risk has changed, we live in a complex interdependent world where the greatest threatests are happening on the timescale of decades or centuries.” 58 - Adam

“If you say that our species hasn’t evolved to recognise long term threats, why should we care about them now, wouldn’t that be going against our own biology?” - Chauntel

Fisher, ‘Are We Living at the “Hinge of History”?’

“Our species has always transcended biology to create this world, we fly on airplanes despite our inability to fly like birds. Unlike the hunter gatherers looking for immediate gratification, we have the ability to irreversibly degrade the biosphere, or misdirect technology to cause a catastrophic setback to civilisation.The Earth has existed for 45 million centuries, yet we live at the cusp of a singularly special century where our species has the planet’s future in its hands.”Adam

“I hear you and I do understand the need to recognise long term issues yet I’m unable to fathom how I could do anything about this?” - Chauntel

“The recognition is a good start and it goes a long way in preventing the climate crisis I find myself in. We live in a collective psychosis where our actions are dictated not by the urgency of the impending crisis but hedonistic pursuits. Your priorities right now might be getting a job, starting a family or even buying a house, yet none of this would matter if we don’t prioritise the safeguarding of the human species.” - Adam

March 1621 “Hello Mr. Chauntel.” “Hello, Hi, What year is this? Who are you?” “This is your subconscious speaking, I’m from 1621.” “But how is it possible? I made this radio now, how can I hear back in time.” “Well you can’t go back to the past, you can’t hear the future either, it’s the ability of your mind to travel which makes you the time traveller.” “Was I dreaming all this while?” “Yes you were, with your subconscious mind building up all of these characters.” “What’s happening? Am i still in a dream?” “Yes, you’re just lucid dreaming, a special state of dreaming where you’re aware of your dreams.” “How do I know if this is real?” “Well for starters, you don’t live in the Victorian era, your name is not Mr. Chauntel and you just dozed off on your desk writing your dissertation.” “Does that mean I can’t time travel?” “You can! All Humans have a cognitive ability that no other animal possesses mental time travel. You can think back to the past, reimagine your walk back from

the studio last week or a pleasant conversation you had with a friend yesteraday. Then, just as rapidly, you can imagine a future holiday or eating dinner in the evening.” “What good is this mental time travel if i can’t physically be there?” “The benefit of this superpower is enormous, it allows us to act in the present to secure future needs. You could imagine a hunter gatherer running the savannas of Africa to secure water despite their thirst being quenched in the anticipation that they would need water later.59 You could imagine ecological destruction in 2121 because you have evidence for irreversible climate change in the news everyday.” “Does that mean I can tell the future?” “You can’t tell the future, foresight is not fortunetelling, Marxism was implemented with foresight into the changes the industrial revolution would bring us, yet it didn’t quite materialise in the way we would want. We must distinguish the capacity for mental time travel with its contents.60” “So I can mental time travel but I can’t really do anything with it.” “You can! You could provoke, imagine new realities, influence our current conceptions of the world” “How? I’m no industrialist or policymaker? I’m a mere designer trying to complete his postgraduate degree.”

Thomas Suddendorf and Michael C. Corballis, ‘The Evolution of Foresight: What Is Mental Time Travel, and Is It Unique to Humans?’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30.3 (2007), 299–313 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X07001975>. 60 Thomas Suddendorf and Michael C. Corballis, ‘Mental Time Travel across the Disciplines: The Future Looks Bright’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30.3 (2007), 335–45 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0700221X>.

“Art & Design is a foundational element of Culture making, and culture is the seed from which civilisation grows. The work of shifting the conversation to long term thinking has already begun with many artists & designers contributing to the effort. Currently, the Long Now Foundation is leading the way by creating artefacts which extend beyond our current temporal frames of reference. Take for instance their millennium clock, an art piece that is designed to run for ten millennia with minimum human intervention. There’s also the Longplayer, a self-extending composition with Tibetan bowls which started on 1 Jan 2000 and will go on without repetition until 299961. These projects reflect a newer intent in art & design, to create something that outlasts its creators. This intent is not born out of hubris but the urgent need for us to reflect on our practice as designers & makers of services/products. ” “I understand the aim of the projects intellectually however not everyone would. How can any of these projects yield a shift in people’s mindsets about time?”

“These projects don’t just work on an intellectual level, they hit us on a visceral level as well. Certain artists deliberately create experiences that bypass the reasoning brain and produce sensations for our emotional and embodied self. Design Studio Superflux created an installation showcasing what the polluted air of 2030 would smell like if nothing changed, senior policymakers who got a whiff of the noxious air came out more convinced than years of scientific studies and data modelling did. In another project called Mitigation of Shock, the studio created a dystopian London

Ella Saltmarshe and Beatrice Pembroke, ‘How Art and Culture Can Help Us Rethink Time’ <https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190521-how-art-and-culture-can-help-us-rethink-time> [accessed 12 May 2021].

apartment retrofitted to adapt to the climate crisis.62 It moved viewers to think deeply about the consequences of their actions by bringing the future closer to them.”

“These seem like emotionally moving stories, what about design that actually impacts people’s lives?”

“Stories are crucial to designing services for people, our current stories make the status quo justifiable and make the world feel preordained. It's only when we conjure up new stories, we open up the conversation for a newer kind of design. The project Forest of the Future invited various stakeholders like politicians, citizens, consumers, voters, businesses to rethink the future laws that might govern London’s Waltham Forest63. While it achieved this through the creation of speculative scenarios, the outcomes were tangible ideas on how we might change our ways in the present to meet future challenges”

“I think I’m going to wake up in some time, I feel my alarm going off in the back, what should I take away from this wild dream?”

“A new perspective on time perhaps and the role of design in its manifestation. If we want to ensure humans have a long thriving future on our planet we must start with our own practice as designers and build in long-termism in our visions of products & services.” 62

‘Mitigation of Shock (London)’, Superflux <http://superflux.in/index.php/work/mitigation-of-shock/> [accessed 13 May 2021]. 63 ‘Test 2’, SRG Bennett <https://www.srgbennett.com/forest-of-the-future> [accessed 13 May 2021].

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Service Design in the 4th dimension

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Time Travelling Designer

The Great Temporal Famine