This is the write-up of my talk at EuroIA 2013 containing my thoughts for the presentation and a set of additional resources that I found useful whilst writing my talk.
When you observe the recent rise of mobile companies such as Instagram, Twitter and SnapChat you can spot similarities in the way they approach time. They show you what happened in the last day, hour or second and they are brilliant at it. At conferences, restaurants, buses, at work or even in bed, everywhere you find people endlessly refreshing their feed, forever sucked into the eternal now.
We’re great at building tools for the now; we can design products that hypnotise people in forever refreshing. But surely we shouldn’t stop there. Digital technology can be so much more than just entertainment. What about the future? Can we build tools for the long now?
he question I want to explore is: what are the ingredients that allow us to successfully design for the organisation of time? Not just in second and nanoseconds but also years and decades. I will discuss this in three parts: first, time artefacts, such as clocks and calendars, we’ve developed to make sense of time. Second, the way our mind works with time, and finally, how we can apply this knowledge in the digital world.