Project Description
Although phones have become ubiquitous, and they are marginally more effective in keeping time, we still wear stylish watches and keep analog timepieces in our office to glance at every once in awhile. Taking this into account, we have designed and produced EMIT. EMIT is a clock that shows you your perception of time based on your emotional and cognitive state. We show the rate at which time flows for an individual by varying the speed of an extra clock hand through strobe lights. We also show the individual’s current perceived emotion by using different hues of RGB LED lights. Time perception is complex as it is dependent on the different ways in which our brain experiences perceptions (Van Wassenhove 2008) and reconstructs those experiences in different parts of the brain (Rao, Mayer, Harrington 2001). Our goal in this project is not to find a holistic way of measuring one’s time perception, but to put together the different pieces that are known to influence time perception and to represent people’s distorted time perception to them in a meaningful and informative way. The hope is that increased awareness of time perception would trigger behavior change, e.g. take a break to reduce anxiety and slow down time perception.