PROJECT #03 EXPERIMENTAL CLOCK

CLOCK OF THE FEMALE HEART

Description

Brief: Design and code an experimental clock that expresses a novel way of tracking time.

Concept: To calculate ellapsed time based on a female body's heart beat (one of her/their many internal rhythms, another one being menstruation). Since heartbeats depend on a myriad of factors, the time ellapsed would also in turn depend on all the internal and external factors, which include the mental state (emotions+) of the body, the physical activity of the body, the age and overall health of the body.

This clock's settings can be adjusted for age and physical activity. The more you let the clock run, you can notice the disparity of standard time and heart time.

Some studies do suggest that our heart rate does impact our perception of time, but to call that relationship linear would be an oversimplification (Blog: Time perception and the heart) . Nevertheless, if one of the most consistent systems in the human body exhibits this diversity in time intervals, then should our standard time incorporate that flexibility in some way?

The clock is by no means accurate. It is ridden with gaps in research, my personal biases, and decisions of simplification and approximation that I couldn't help but take, especially in order to finish the project in time.

Design Process

Step 01 Ideation

Sketched three possible ideas I was interested in. The first one was on menstruation, and how that the female body follows this cycle - exhibiting different energy levels, abilities, moods and needs at different points of this cycle. Despite this, how much do we align (or how much are we able to align) our routine activities to this consistent high impact natural cycle?

The next idea was based on social media. It was the concept of how scrolling on instagram speeds up perceived time when in fact a lot of time passes in standard time. To depict this, I wanted to simulate time as a series of lines, which create spirals when you start scrolling on social media, and suddenly unfurl when you stop, to show you how much time has been swept away.

The last idea was the one I went ahead with - to depict the rhythm of time our heart follows, and bring out the similarities and differences of its rhythm with standard time.

Step 02 Research

In order to understand heart rates and the factors influencing it, I had to look up documentation of heart rates at different ages, genders, and during different levels of activity, All the sources of information have been mentioned as comments in the source code.

Sources of research include:
01 Cleveland Clinic: Pulse & Heart Rate
02 Mayo Clinic: Know your Numbers: Heart rate
03 Resting Heart Rate Chart
04 What is a Good Resting Heart Rate by Age and Gender?
05 Blog: How To Boost Swimming Performance Through Real Time Heart Rate Monitoring

It is interesting how no source had complete information - they either skipped several age groups, did not differentiate by gender, or did not cover heart rates during different stages of activity. So the data for this program is a messy amalgamation of several slightly differing data sets.

Reflection

Methods of Mapping AGE to BPM and their Implicate Biases

There were many points during this where I felt I was being inaccurate, or making absurd approximations or exerting biases. One example is when I was mapping ages to BPM. I thought of many ways age ranges can be mapped to BPM. Each method posed different levels inaccuracy, approximation and bias and I had to chose what approximation or error I commit. Here are some of them.

//01 bpm = random(61, 65);
This was the approach I felt comfortable using, as it replicates the data set the closers, by assigning a random BPM from the range that's been discovered for a specific age. However, it depends on the accuracy of the data set, in my case was an amalgamation of several sets of data, since no one source covered women from 0 - 90 years.

//02 bpm = map (age, 65, 79, 59, 63);
This helped when working with larger ages, but was based on the my bias - that the bpm keeps increasing slightly with age - which is not true entirely - and is a pattern only in the very early and late stages of life.

//03 bpm = (75 + 128)/2;
One of the methods I'd initially used was to apply a blanket bpm for age ranges. But this felt inaccurate and did not depict how diverse BPMs can be.

The 'If I had More Time' Section

Given more time, adding some of the other factors (like emotions, genders, body's health levels etc) would paint a more diverse picture of how much this internal rhythm varies in contrast to standard time. I would have liked to have been able to reset the map, and calaculate time based on a mish mash of activities.

Due to time, I also had to choose between using data of BPM - age - activity correlations from women or men. I chose women, as a deliberate alternative to products being tailored by default to white male bodies.

Credits

This project used the typeface Nanum Gothic Coding by Sandoll licensed under Open Font License Credits to sources for data on heart rates and its correlation with age, gender and activity levels have been included under the research section above, as well as comments in the source code.