Imagine a clock that you can smash all you want and it won’t break. Keep Imagining because that clock doesn’t exist. However, Matthias Lange here, has come up with a prototype called ‘Smash’ that not only takes a beating but encourages you to by making it part of its interface. You have to punch it to stop it ringing.
Thorunn Arnadottir’s bead clock is a necklace where each bead represents 5 minutes. The orange and red beads represent hours. As the wheel on which it rests, turns, one bead falls off thus counting the passing of time.
To tell the time, one has to count the beads and to help with that, Thorunn has a silver bead for midnight and a golden one for noon.
According to Thorunn, his prototype’s goal was to create a more ‘emotional’ perception of time and to take it further, you could express your freedom from time by removing the beads from the wheel, then in a symbolic gesture of defiance, he recommends you wear the necklace as a statement that you are in control of your minutes.
The Minute Glass ia concept clock that requires no batteries or current. It wakes you up to your favorite radio station but it won’t shut off until you’ve shaken it until it has enough energy for it to wake you up the next day. With no snooze button, this really makes you to wake up.
Time telling products have always leveraged their production process as part of their storytelling in order to add an emotional value. Maria and Piotr from Gogo borrow this age old meme with a fresh approach – they made multiple clocks in a single length of raw pinewood with the intention of involving the customer in the process by making them hack their item from the log thus creating their personal touch and hopefully, some emotion attachment to the item.
Designer Mac Funamizu’s ‘Touch n Know The Time’ clock has triangles on the side of the shell that move so you can tell whether you have time left to sleep before the alarm rings. If they are close, you have to get out of bed real soon and if they are far apart, you have lots of time left. The clock was inspired by the alien bomb countdown in the movie “Independence Day”.
In a bid to make timekeeping ‘interesting’, Inventor John Taylor has created a £1m mechanical clock called the “Time Eator” that has no hands or numbers. It features a giant grasshopper and has 60 slits cut on its face from where a light shows the time.
The Grasshopper is more than just a decoration. It moves around the clock, each step marking a second. Every time it moves, it triggers a blue flashing light that travels across the face until it stops at the current hour and minute. The clock is only accurate once every five minutes.
The Grasshopper metaphor was a tribute to English clockmaker Johan Harrison that had invented an internal mechanism that allowed the clock to move its gear at every swing of a pendulum in a grandfather clock. He had called it the grasshopper escapement. According to Dr. Taylor, he took that concept and turned the clock inside out so you could see the seconds being ‘eaten up by the grasshopper’.
