We first went to the wrong room, once we found each other, we moved some tables around to make a good thinking environment.

Dave gave us creative challenges on the concept of time:

1. How could you visually represent sayings about time?
2. How to visually represent different moments in our own life?
3. How to visually represent the passage/experience of someone else’s time?
4. Discussion: brainstorm and develop ideas

During the challenges I made some random observations:

• 3 out of 7 used sound -> during our discussion I realised it was actually 2 out of 7
• 3 out of 7 using pen and paper +1 if you count Dave
• 7 out of 7 were silent
• 6 sheets of paper were used in total
• 5 laptops were open
• 1 tablet was being used
• 1 sound deck
• 1 hour passed during the challenges
• 2 sets of headphones were used, but 3 sets were brought

Outcomes: some of us used these to create whole concepts for the project

• Task 1:

• • Caitlin:
    Very literal interpretation of the challenge. I drew little clock figures and knives, all sorts to literally represent the sayings. One thing I drew was similar to Yanis, I had drawn one saying like a pulse. 
  • Yanis:
    Very deep and philosophical take on the sayings. He also used Chinese sayings and tried to represent those. One thing he thought about was about how water has memory; all memories can flow down into a single droplet of water and once it drops, that represents the end of life, just done in a blink. 
  • Lulu:
    She used a Chinese saying that was about how people die, but objects live on. She drew some cute illustrations of a teddy bear and a person growing up until death, with the teddy bear staying intact. We talked about this a little bit about how time can move around an object and how they perceive life much slower than the world around them. 
  • Shuzhang:
    She combined task one and two and made a soundscape (?) about how time flies. It involved sounds that reminded her of her childhood, but also had elements like time ticking in the background. 
  • Jackson:
    He also made a soundscape about the saying time flies. He talked about how childhood passes by quickly but now feels like hazy memories to him. His sound included a high-pitched ringing sound that almost felt like it was trying to snap the listener out of the memory. This prompted us to talk about how memories can be tied to music and can transport us back to the moment that we associate it with. 
  • Dave:
    He also took things literally. I don’t remember the sayings he used, but I remember he made drawings of how the flow of time felt. He showed this through dots and lines, and an hourglass. The most interesting though was a drawing of a film roll with mechanical hands grabbing a memory to show. It was an interesting visual to see and got us thinking about the endless possibilities with this topic. 

• Task 2:

• • Shuzhang:
    She made a sound that reminded her of her hometown and the typical sounds that she grew up hearing, and she felt were only found there. 
  • Lulu:
    She talked about shared generational objects to represent life stages. For example, she drew a small paper folding game and (I think) a certain TV show that are representative of the childhood of Chinese people of her generation. It made us think about culturally shared memories. 
  • Yanis:
    He talked about a stand-out memory from childhood involving a plane ride. He remembers the music and colours, and other sounds that were present then. He said that even though, at the time, it wasn’t a particularly interesting experience, he will still remember it to this day when he hears the familiar music/sound and that it has almost become a bitter memory. 
  • Caitlin:
    I thought about my life on the same type of day and the feeling of emotions over time. I used the first day of primary and secondary school, undergraduate and postgraduate. I found that for each event, my emotions became more complex, but the time felt shorter. I drew lines like a pulse for each emotion and then how the speed of time felt. It ended up looking like mountains

• Task 3:

• • Lulu:
    She talked about a girl with cancer who recently passed. Soon before she passed, people all over the world rallied to fulfill her ultimate wish; to appear as an animated character alongside her favourite animated characters. Lulu talked about how even though she isn’t physically with us anymore, her digital representation will live on in that space. 
  • Caitlin:
    I talked about mountains. The previous tasks inspired me to think about how objects, or in this case mountains, experience time. A place like Arthur’s Seat will have seen so much already but will “personally” experience little change, and at a much slower pace. So how there is micro and macro time, and how that can be shown visually. 
  • Dave:
    He talked about loss and fleeting images combined with music. He talked more about how music can bring up memories, for example in people with alzheimers and how it’s often the last thing they can actually tie memories to. He played some work, by an artist whose name I don’t remember, that dealt with this phenomenon. He created a song that sounded like an old record player playing in an empty ballroom. The music felt nostalgic, empty and dusty almost. It was interesting to hear as it got us thinking about the way music was used here. 
  • Yanis:
    He thought about how 1 minute passes differently for everyone. He referred back to the exercise Jules made the whole class do last week, where he asked everyone to put their hand up when we thought a minute had passed. He thought about how we all had a different perception of this same amount of time, but that machines for example will get it on the dot right, but there’s no thought behind it; it’s cold and meaningless.

 

• Discussion:

We talked about our ideas a bit, and tried to organise them into categories to make some sense of them. I put them on the white board that was standing next to our table. 

The overarching theme that naturally appeared was the passage of time. The categories we ended up with were memories, the length of time, flow, sensory triggers, and landscape. We then added the sub-topics to each of these e.g., life stages, music, micro vs macro, pulse, objects, cultural, etc. David asked us each to point out our favourite things on the white board. I assigned everyone a different little symbol to have a clear view (Caitlin = star, Yanis = dot, Hasse = cross, Lulu = heart, Shuzhang = flower, Jackson = triangle). The most popular options ended up being:
(CULTURAL) MEMORIES + FLOW OF TIME + MUSIC
From this we tried making some connections. One option that came up was looking at the passage of a small time frame (perhaps a minute or so) per life stage, and represent a prevalent emotion from that life stage. Take childhood for example; you’re at school, full of curiosity and excitement, how would a minute feel to them compared to someone in their 20s working. We liked this but decided to do some more research into our 3 main topics relating to our overarching theme.

To do:

• Research our overarching theme and three topics

Feb 5, 2025