Testing Time

The difference between an analogue clock and a digital one is similar to the difference between a pie chart and a table of numbers – the former is more intuitive, and provides a more concrete sense of the passing hours and minutes (although digital clocks have the advantage of being able to display a complete day, while analogue clocks display half a day, and then repeat the process for the other half). Ben Klinger and Shay Carmon are attempting to expand the visual range of the analogue clock, by integrating into its design both the force of gravity and the perspective that comes with a three-dimensional representation.

Klinger and Carmon, graduates in Industrial Design from HIT, who together set up Studio Ve (“And…”), have designed three types of wall clocks, which they were able to fund through a successful Kickstarter crowdsourcing campaign. The first is the Manifold Clock, whose hands are connected by a flexible sheet, which folds and twists as the hands move. The second is the Lithe Clock, whose hands are long and flexible; the ends tilt downward under the influence of gravity.

The third, whose funding project recently concluded, is Perspective Clocks, a series of five wall clocks whose hands are three-dimensional structures that give the clocks a different appearance depending on the angle from which they are viewed.

“The project focuses on the hands and the forms that they create, which in turn give meaning to the clock’s movements. Each clock treats the dimension of time in a different way,” says Klinger.

“With a clock, the perception of time is linear, uniform, unidirectional and cyclic. But that’s not how we experience time,” says Carmon. “When you are talking with someone on the phone, or waiting for someone to call, your sense of time is totally different. When you are a child you have a different sense of time, everything takes forever, but as an adult you ask yourself where the year has flown. It’s totally non-uniform. Standard clocks have something very controlled about them, their pace. We have tried to make something that, rather than showing us the time, will make us stop and look at the clock, and then think about our own time.”