The UX of Time: Normative Time vs Personal Time

Irene (Shiyin Zheng)
Nov 18, 2018
6 min read

Updated: Jan 3, 2019

The UX of Time

Team

Yiheng Du

Michael Chiu

Elaine (Yufan Zhang)

Jing Zhao

Irene(me)

Development of the Idea

We thought about lipsticks, waters, and money to keep trace of time in the "timekeeper" workshop. But then we ended up with choosing the "battery" idea, which used percentage to record people's energy, just like the smartphone. The energy was related with people's working efficiency, and it changed as the time in 24 hours.

There were some problems in this idea. One was about the definition of the word "efficiency". Everyone has his own criteria for it and we cannot simply say one is not in high efficiency even if he was thinking and outputting nothing. More importantly, some people just like the status of being inefficient, is it necessary to push them?

Another one was that we could not use the measurable percentage to describe unmeasurable human efficiency. Using the percentage means we can use a number to tell how much is it, but it is not true for the abstract efficiency. It was not logical.

The last one was that we simply deducted percentage from 100% and ignored the possibility of adding percentage. Also, the initial number could not necessarily be 100% all the time.

The Disparity Between the Social Time and Individual Time

We continued our discussion and thought about the efficiency again. I saw the video in the brief link and got inspired by the author's way of defining time by space. She created new space and let people get away 24-hour time, making people more concentrated and controllable of their own time, to some extent. This also reminded me to focus on the individual perception of time.

Next, we got away with the high-efficiency thing and started to care more about the disparity between the social time and individual time. We noticed that there was a normative time, for example, the class time for us students, and there was also a personal preferred time to do such things. There was a conflict between them.

To know more about this, we carried out some tests. We invited 11 volunteers to draw their efficiency chart according to 24 hours and we combined them in one chart. We also asked them questions related to time, like the get-up time, like when was the most energetic time and how they synchronised time with others?

We asked people to draw at least eight dots on the chart and later we connected the dots together to see the pattern. We found that people had different peak times and some could be in high-efficiency status for more than one time a day. There was also one person adjusting her time in order to fit her time with her home country's friends.

Generally, the patterns of the majority indicate the normative time, which was the class time in college here. However, it also reminded us that some people were not energetic at all during the class. It was not their time.

An Experiment As A Metaphor

We wanted to reveal that problem in an interactive but ironic way, in the meantime, measure the gap between the social time and the personal time. We built up a printer using a cardboard box, made a roll of receipts manipulated by us indicating the social time in uniform motion. The person who controlled the roll (time) was like a god. As he rolled up, the social time was passing away. However, there would also be preset colour blocks on the roll, they were like lunch time, fire alarms and alike, and you had to stop when you saw these.

Participant has to finish typing one specific paragraph given by us and pay attention to the time box at the same time.
When the participant saw coloured blocks on the roll, He/she has to stop typing immediately;
While the coloured blocks pass by, he/she has to continue again.

The god was controlling the society time, and the person typing was following his/her own personal time. The person had to look at the social time from time to time to keep him/her synchronised with it, but interestingly, there would still be gap between these two times, and we marked this by adding stick-it-ons to the on-going roll.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzIplDGGY7c

These four were the former outcomes of our experiments. We noticed some interesting things during the experiment. For instance, people would continue to revise the wrong words they typed even if they just saw the stopping sign. They wanted to continue instead of controlled by the outside. There were also times people were immersed in the typing task too much and they forgot to look at the "social time". People felt disturbed by the interventions and could not finish the task in a high-accuracy rate.

It was just a game but it showed the disparity in a metaphor way. The society time here, or we call the normative time, is also interesting, because we form it together and then we get affected and we are controlled by it.

A Look Into "Hormonal Time"

Sleep time & Sleep disorders

We have noticed the disparity between the normative time and the personal time. Whereas, normative time could mean from as small as dinner time in a day to as big as the marriage age in a lifetime. It is such a subjective thing that people could understand in his own way. Thus, we chose one specific area, sleep time, to compare between the normative one and the personal one.

Normally, we would say that a healthy life would start from sleeping before 11p.m. and having an approximately 8 hours sleep. But based our interviews and the charts I mentioned before, we found that few people sleep at that time, some saying late-night time for them was the most efficient time and they did not feel like sleeping so early, and some would say they just did not get tired so early.

We then did some research and managed to find some reasons behind this. There are six circadian rhythm sleep disorders. There are people who generally feel tired later at night than most people causing them to say up later but still requiring 7-9 hours of sleep . These are called Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (DSPS) and they would typically rise later in the morning as well. An opposite for this type is called Advanced Sleep Phase Syndrome (ASPS). There are also Non-24-Hour Sleep-Wake Syndrome who have slightly longer than 24-hour sleep cycles, Irregular Sleep-Wake Rhythm whose sleep occurs as various “naps” throughout a 24-hour period.

What Decides Sleepiness?

The mechanism behind the sleepiness is associated with one hormone called "melatonin". Usually, when a certain amount of light comes to the eyes, Hypothalamus, a part of the brain decides whether it is day or night. If the answer is night, then it stimulates secretion of "melatonin", and this hormone is the one causing us sleepy. Similarly, "seretonin" is the one making us awaken.

To make it concise, the content of melatonin can tell whether we are feeling sleepy or not. Sometimes people are in the same room doing the same thing, but some of them may feel sleepier than others.

Take us students for example. Students all start from 10.00 in the morning, seeming all in a same level but differently underneath (due to different sleep time or something) . Then as class goes on, some are getting more tired than others. During lunch, it came to a slight difference. Then after a whole day’s class, students are in completely different statuses. However later in the night, it comes to silence again and everyone arrives in the same again.

The interesting thing is that they all start from the same though different underneath and end in same again.

Demonstration Model

We made a demonstration model to show this. Each of these test tubes was for one person and the purple liquid is like the melatonin extracted from the body. The contents in these test tubes are in the same height, but if we open move the black paper away (open the box), we could see the difference underneath. They are standing from a different height of bases and getting various amount of the liquid, but they try to be the same by getting a cover to pretend it.