Wednesday, October 13, 2004
2154: The Future of Time Design Competition
Core77 and Timex sponsored a design competition to see what the future of timekeeping might be 150 years from now.
There are some very wonderful and insightful designs, but I couldn't help but wonder if they were too near-sighted. Most seem possible within half that time.
Also, while elegance, simplicity, and cool will no doubt keep time pieces around in some form or another I wonder if the progress towards heads up displays, and augmented reality might obviate the need for a separate piece altogether, with time information just being part of what is always available to you.
Finally, I feel like pretty much all of the concepts ignore the personal systems you might have in place. Aside from already providing you the time as mentioned above, these systems will likely centrally coordinate other devices (including nano-devices, should they exist) so that there would be no need for ways of "setting" the time on a device (many of the time pieces were temporary and would need initial setting) as many of the entries went out of their way to describe how to do.
All in all, these entries provide a nice way of thinking differently about basic concepts.
Core77 and Timex present 2154: The Future of Time Design Competition