Friday, May 10, 2013

Thinking about time and speed

Half formed ideas and links here.

Been reading a lot of blogs and listening to talks, going to a workshop, thinking about how we view time and how fast it goes. In Motion has a bunch of thoughts about time, in relation to travel; while a lot of the book is frustrating (what is "Deep Travel"? is it just "traveling while paying attention"? why does it need a name?), it makes me think about time as experienced vs. time on the clock.

Monochronic vs. polychronic time - first pointed out to me in two papers by Gloria Mark and Laura Dabbish. Monochronic is what we're used to: one thing at a time, time matters, be on time. Polychronic time sense is the approximate kind of time; do a couple things at once, value relationships more than the time. (but multitasking doesn't work! what's going on here?)

Contemplative Computing points me to a few things: an article about speed mentioning Google Glass cutting down the picture taking time from 12 seconds to 1 second, an interview with Linda Stone on time management vs. attention management, a group interview where Neema Moraveji talks of (among other things) "speed bumps" put into typical tasks. We're putting speed bumps into one task and taking them out of others (and indeed, as texts-on-the-Pebble has shown, removing speed bumps is surprisingly awesome). The answer is probably not "speed is good" or "speed bumps are good", but something more subtle. What is it?

Another thing I want to jot down here: calendars are to time as maps are to space. Ponder that.

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