Experimental Clock

Description

The white arc which extends in a circular orbit represents the time unit “second”. When it becomes a complete white ring every 60 seconds, the blue arc extends indicating that one minute has passed. The purple arc works the same way as the time unit “hour”. When 55 minutes has passed, a green circle will appear on the canvas and last for 5 minutes. In another loop, the red circle appears for 15 seconds and disappears for 45 seconds.

Design Process

For this assignment, my idea is to create something functioned as a timer. First I thought about showing a figure or a short text every 5 minutes as a reminder. But I were not aware of how much time has passed or left if I don’t visualize the time. So I drew out three arcs indicating the time unit second, minute and hour and extended them in a circular way. The inspiration of designing a timer comes from my daily life. I find myself sitting on the chair and staring at the screen for a long time everyday, which hurts my eyes and makes me very tired. So I create the green circle which appears after 55 minutes to remind me to take my eyes off the screen for a while. It will stay there for 5 minutes and once it disappears, I know that I could go back to work and study. The red circle in the centre which appears after 45 seconds and stays for 15 seconds is another timer for my workout. I often do high-intensity interval training to save time, which means I work hard for 45 seconds with 15 seconds of rest and repeat the process for around 30 minutes. With the timer, I get to know when to start and to rest by looking at the red circle.

Reflection

I spent quite time on the design, trying to figure out the function and how the clock would track time in a different way comparing to a normal clock. I also encountered with bugs during the coding. In most cases, these problems had something to do with my logic flaws and sloppy code. For example, when I was trying out the“if else”statement, it wouldn’t work without rigorous coding and small details like brackets can cause failure.