My goal for this project was to create a clock the encoded naturalistic time based on a human’s life. I wanted a watch that didn’t tell me where I was at in terms of abstract quantity like minutes and hours, but instead would tell me where I’m at in terms of rising and setting of the sun or my own birth and expected death. I wanted this watch to be normative and tell me what I should be doing based on these biological rhythms. I wanted a watch to slow me down, not speed me up.

This was my first time coding in C, and it greatly limited the my design palette. I spent a lot of time learning about pointers and references, and learning how to manage floats and doubles. Because of this, sketching became much more important as a way to get myself out of programming deadends. I often felt like I was a running back and C were people trying to bring me down.

I originally wanted to juxtapose the proportion of my life completed with the number of texts, calls, and emails I received in a day. I could not figure out how to get this data, and so I abandoned the telling-time by communication concept. I sketched ideas showing a variety of time juxtapositions on one screen. Time until dinner, time until death, how long I’ve been in a relationship, Time until the next season begins. The sketches didn’t feel right, and they didn’t have a lot of motion to them.

I arrived at a concept for a simple particle system that pulses at various frequencies throughout the day. As the day begins, small dots wander the screen. By midday, the dots breathe in and out faster and faster. By the end of the day, the dots again wander, but they have grown larger filling the screen with blackness.

All things considered, I am pleased with the final design. Using the watch for a few days, the watchface feels like reading tea leaves. I look at it and I want it to give me permission to slow down in the evening. Are the dots pulsing more slower? Or is that my imagination I think. I would have liked this to be the first part of a larger watchface. I saw a number of watchface that use taps and motion to show different views of time, I would have liked to have gotten an juxtaposed watchface working.