The Brief

How far can Human Centred Design go? Can design do more than improve user’s short term experiences of and interactions with objects, can it be used to truly enrich their lives in the long run?

The Approach

In Bonnie Ware’s book ‘The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departed’ the most common regret is:

“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself”

Whilst this seemed a dauntingly abstract subject I felt it should be possible to distill this into a single action/object that could catalyse the user into living for themselves.

As part of my broad and varied explorations I came to learn about time orientation (how different cultures percieve and prioritise time). I recognised that cultures that perceive time as cyclical (Indo-Chinese/Pacific) and as present centric (Southern Europe, Arabia, Pacific Islands) live more honestly and more hedonistically respectively. Could an object be designed to challenge a person’s engrained cultural perception and catalyse a change towards these more honest & hedonistic orientations?

This timepiece retains its traditional timekeeping functionality but relogates this to a secondary function, instead focusing the user’s attention on passing moments by dramatically inflating the visual value of the second hand. This is paired with a continuous sweep mechanism that ensures the watch is always moving, presenting time as an ever-present cycle.