Temporal Design
What changes when we start thinking about time as coming that is designed – and could be redesigned?
Temporal Design is a way of looking at time as a material for design, while looking at it, not as pace, direction, and subjective experience, but as emerging out of relations between cultural, social, economic and political forces. The process of Temporal Design involves:
1) Identifying dominant narratives of time, including the forces and infrastructures that sustain them or which they help to support;
2) Challenging these narratives, e.g. by revealing more nuanced expressions of time;
3) Drawing attention to temporalities that could be seen as alternative to the dominant one, including their dynamics and significance;
4) Exposing networks of temporalities, illustrating multiplicity and variety.
We believe that a pluralist perspective of time could help demystify problematic experiences and potentially enable more inclusive ways of understanding time.
General Inquires
Please contact Larissa Pschetz at L.Pschetz@ed.ac.uk
Related publications
Pschetz, L., & Bastian, M. (2018). Temporal Design: Rethinking time in design. Design Studies, 56, 169-184.
Pschetz, L. (2021). No futures: Design for a renewed focus on the present. In Working with Time in Qualitative Research (pp. 36-49). Routledge.
Pschetz, L., Koppel, K., & Bastian, M. (2024). Design for temporal cohabitation. In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-8).
Bastian, M. (2012). Fatally confused: Telling the time in the midst of ecological crises. Environmental Philosophy, 9(1), 23-48.
Pschetz, L, Bastian, M & Bowler, R 2022, Revealing Social Infrastructures of Time. in H Knox & G John (eds), Speaking for the Social: A Catalogue of Methods. Punctum Books.
Bowler, R., Bach, B., & Pschetz, L. (2022). Exploring Uncertainty in Digital Scheduling, and the Wider Implications of Unrepresented Temporalities in HCI. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: CHI’22.
Bastian, M. (2017). Liberating clocks: developing a critical horology to rethink the potential of clock time. New Formations, 92(92), 41-55.
Pschetz, L. (2014). Temporal design: design for a multi-temporal world (Doctoral dissertation, University of Dundee/Edinburgh).