Time perception is the result of the physical progression of events and the way we experience them. For centuries, the way we experience time has heavily relied on visual and auditory senses; little has been done with the experience of time and haptics. As technology is increasingly embedded in our everyday life, and wearables are becoming increasingly popular, we explore the concept of ‘feeling’ time as a way of augmenting human cognition.

In this project, we present initial work into users’ interactions with, and appropriation of, a simple wearable device that vibrates every five minutes. We discuss how lightweight interactions with such a device can increase our awareness of time in a peripheral way through the sense of touch, by presenting initial findings from two in-the-wild autoethnographies.

Publication:

Harrison, D., & Cecchinato, M.E. (2015, September). Give me five minutes!: feeling time slip by. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (pp. 45-48). ACM.