Aliot-Clock
The goal in this project for me was to make a clock that didn’t completely abstract the data so that the time was readable, but that didn’t immediately appear to be a clock. I used the concentric orbiting motion of celestial bodies to inspire how I thought about days, hours, minutes and seconds, each of which is represented by a circle. The intersections of the circles belay information about the hour, minute, second, or millisecond respectively.
In my planning, I had initially run through several ideas. One was a poem-clock in which I would use a rhyming dictionary to find words that rhymed with the time. For example “five thirty six” could be abstracted to “jive dirty kicks.” The user would have to solve a sort of riddle to determine the time. I then contemplated using a more physical, particle-like representation for units of time reacting in a Rube Goldberg setup. Seconds would be falling circles which would collect into a container, merge together, and then pour into another container containing larger circles representing minutes, etc. I thought that my current representation was a good compromise between legibility and physicality.
