Loop’s Rachel Wingfield and Mathias Gmachl have created a personalised alarm clock that is integrated into your bedding. Drawing inspiration from how light has controlled our body clock by telling us when to sleep and when to wake, the duo have created a pillow and duvet that simulate a natural dawn that ease you into your day by using electroluminescent technology to turn the textile surface into a reactive light source.

Apart from the novelty of, the clock is also supposed to treat sufferers of seasonal affective disorder (SAD) where insufficient levels of daylight cause medical conditions caused by a hormonal imbalance ranging from depression to loss of energy, pre-menstrual syndrome, weight gain and migraines.

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Loop.ph: Light Sleeper

This gives new meaning to the word “Wall Clock” - Three designers from the Royal College of Art (The very same university where the designer behind the Paper Clock was from) have come up with an innovative use of heating elements and ink that allows graphics, words and numbers to be displayed within a concrete.

Very similar in concept to the paper clock, the “Chronos Chromos Concrete” as it is called, uses Thermochromic ink, which is mixed with the concrete.

Nickel chromium wires are set beneath the concrete surface, which heats up when an electric current passes through. When a certain temperature is reached, the concrete above the wire changes color, thus creating the visual.

Of course, the display of graphics and information depends on the arrangement of the wires.

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Wf: Paper Clock
Chronos Chromos Concrete (via Engadget & Near Near Future)

Margaret Roach of Martha Stewart Living magazine has a great suggestion for a New Year’s Eve party:

“Ask each of your guests to bring an alarm clock set for the stroke of midnight. Place all the clocks on a table or a mantel, and the alarms will go off together in one crazy chorus. ”

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Detroit News: A New Year’s Eve clock party will help get things off to a good start
Wrist Fashion: Clocks need love too

Every mobile device needs to know the time down to the quadrillionth of a second.

David Pescovitz writes about the development of an atomic clock that’s the size of a grain of rice and how the advent of wireless communication is driving the need to create accurate time:

“Most clocks that we check throughout the day are wrong. For example, your wristwatch — whether it’s a Swatch or a Rolex — probably drifts at least a few seconds each week. Of course, that’s probably imperceptible even if you’re so overbooked that every second counts. However, wireless technologies are even more tightly scheduled than you are. Indeed, outfitting mobile devices with clocks that are accurate to the quadrillionths of a second could ratchet up cell phone reliability and GPS accuracy while packing more signals into the dwindling radio spectrum.

That’s why scientists are developing tiny clocks that are stable to one part in 10 billion, meaning they lose or gain a maximum of just one second every 300 years.” [more] (via Boing Boing)

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The Feature: Counting on Tiny Atomic Clocks

UPDATE:

Time after time: North of Boston company uses atoms to create precise timepieces

By now most of us have probably been promised about the wonders of e-paper - flexible thin futuristic displays that could easily double as interactive wallpaper, and while the watch paper isn’t it, it still comes pretty close.

A fully functional clock, The Watch Paper is printed on ordinary paper and uses a heat sensitive coating to tell time. Each digit blurs from one into the other using the heat from the LED in the back which makes the coating transparent, or atleast we figured thats how it works.

Either way, its fiendishly clever and we decided to have a word with Hannes Koch, the creator and congratulate him about it:

Wrist: If there is a word i could use to describe both your paper-clock and the digital tape, it’s “Ingeniuity”. Both play on our perceptions of LED displays, and both seem so obvious, yet no one’s ever thought of it.

Koch: When developing our own “loTech” epaper, we went back to the almost “retro Style” LED Segment displays, because they are so easy to control and very familiar to everyone. Yet they are the perfect “vehicle” to demonstrate the area between digital and analogue which we are interested in. Dealing with the setup of the segment displays for a week day and night and in parallel marvelling at the qualities of tape in general, the signage tape came to mind. It seemed so utterly obvious that I was sure that someone’s done

it before, but I couldn’t find it. To this day no one has complained…

Wrist: How has the RCA helped you develop as a designer?

Koch: I came to the RCA as a product designer from a technical background (BSC Product Design, Brunel University. The unique quality of the RCA was that it challenged me to complement my technical knowledge with a more conceptual approach to design. As an environment it was (and is) extremely stimulating, because chances are that someone did “it” before. So most of the ideas (in the design area) are massively challenged and therefore
developed. It is not always a pleasant process, but it surely encouraged me to try and establish my own area within design.

Wrist: How has the reaction been so far? Would we see a commercial version soon?

Koch: The reaction has been absolutely overwhelming so far. The wallpaper clock today won an IF-Design Concepts award here in Germany and got me into the NESTA creative pioneer programme, which gives me the chance to seriously work on a business plan for that project and then apply for up to £35.000 funding to get it serialized. So yes, there is a very good chance that this will turn into a commercial version next year! Also I have been invited to show in an exhibition about german design during the Designmai 2005 in Berlin and in Tokyo’s Designersblock in October 2005. Apart from that we are looking for seed-funding right now to develop the next step prototype in the next two months. For us the wonderful thing is to be busy straight after graduating with a project which is completely our own…

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Random International

Ever since man put a price on time, Timepieces have been judged for their horological or decorative values, but rarely for their aural experience, that is, until the much recent rise of the quartz movement. Ask any watch aficionado today about their mechanical collection, and they won’t fail to mention the sound and feeling they get when they wind up their mechanical watch.

With this in mind, I recently had a conversation with Douglas Repetto, the creator of the Sine Clock, a sound sculpture that keeps time with sound by encoding it in a set of sine waves:

Wrist: Your clock reminds me of how important sound is to the mechanical watch experience.

Douglas: I can understand that. There’s still something marvelous about the complexity of a mechanical watch mechanism. It seems so unlikely to work!

Wrist: Would you describe in detail how your clock works for our readers?

Douglas: It’s fairly simple. There are three sounds, low, medium, and high. Each one is pulsing at a certain speed.

The low pulsing goes from slow to fast to slow over the course of one minute, the medium pulsing goes from slow to fast to slow over the course of one hour, and the high pulsing goes from slow to fast to slow over the course of one day, so if you sit and listen to the low sound for a minute, you’ll hear its pulse slowly speed up for thirty seconds, then slow down for another thirty seconds. Then it starts again.

Because the speed of each pulse is constantly changing, each moment in the day has a distinct set of pulse speeds.

Technically it works perfectly…but in human terms, it’s difficult to actually tell the time. It’s easy to hear the passing of a minute. But for an hour or a day it’s not really possible to tell precisely what time it is.

But that’s okay, I was thinking more of the way we tell what time of day it is by the position of the sun in the sky or the passing of a train or some other environmental clue. After listening for awhile you get a feeling for the sound at different times of day, but you’re never going to really be able to say “It’s 3:37pm!”

Wrist: How intrusive is it compared to the tick of a watch?

Douglas: It turns out to be a pretty soothing sound. There’s one in a group show in a gallery right now here in New York, and the gallery people were a bit worried at first that the sound would be overwhelming or distracting, but really it’s a very quiet, calm sound.

There’s a short snippet of sound on the website. After a while I find that the sound sort of melts into the background, just the way a clock’s ticking does.

Wrist: How did you first come up with the concept?

Douglas: Almost all of my artwork involves physical or biological cycles, systems, or phenomena of one sort or another. I find natural systems endlessly compelling, and in my works I often try to find ways of making those systems more easily perceivable.

I also tend to work with sound, so I was thinking about our perception of time and started imagining different ways of marking the passage of time with sound. Sine Clock was the result.

(more…)

It might look like a block of wood, but plug it in and it’ll tell you the time. No idea as to how it works, but it would certainly look at home in a Muji store.

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4Senses Interior (Link via MoCoLoCo)