Everything moves in time, but the speed of time can be different depending on your location and perspective — and in outer space, time moves slower. So does that make wristwtches totally useless to astronauts? They may not tell them the exact hour and minute of their relative location while they’re floating around outside Earth’s atmosphere, but when the watches are this cool, who really cares?

The Gamma Series from Divided by Zero is a new collection of timepieces inspired by NASA and outer space, each bearing its own unique eye-catching design. The watches are named after famous scientists and astronauts, including Hawking, Tyson, Bruno, Villard, Aldrin, Grissom, and Shepard. The first four come in dramatic black with luminous markings that offer a glow-in-the-dark surprise when the lights are out, while the latter three designs feature signature NASA colors and materials influenced by spacecraft.

The Gamma series was created using Swiss Super-LumiNova pigments by Tritec for a superior long lasting glow, and the straps are made of lightweight polyurethane for a high-tech look. The intricate Armstrong and Aldrin watches take inspiration from the first two astronauts to walk on the moon, while the watches named for prominent NASA astronauts and commanders Al Shepard and Gus Grissom have a more minimalist look.

The Bruno model, named for Giordano Bruno, is “a reference to schematic and simplistic observations on space in the past,” while the model named for scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson references the event that first made him fall in love with outer space: observing the moon through binoculars as a child. The watch named after French chemist and physicist Paul Villard nods to his discovery of gamma rays, and Stephen Hawking’s namesake design is a “conceptual reference to the attempts to find order in the chaotic reaches of space.”

The designers “calculate every part of the design and construction of the watches with the help of actual mathematicians and engineers, combining pure aesthetics with a pragmatic and appealing look. Each collection is devoted to the greatest minds of the past and the present, honoring their remarkable discoveries that left traces in our history. To capture these amazing moments in a wristwatch format is what [they] aim to achieve with every collection.”

“Each watch has a black PVD-coating on steel parts, a new reworked case that weighs lighter than [its] predecessor, and it runs on Japanese-made Miyota 1S13 movement. All timepieces from the Gamma series are equipped with black leather straps with a signature blue edging.”

The Gamma wristwatch series is currently raising funds for production on Kickstarter, with preorders starting at just $158. Divided by Zero’s previous Alpha and Beta collections, featuring watches named after even more famed scientists and thinkers throughout history, are also available for purchase on the company’s website.

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The French, Tokyo-based artist decided to combine the mathematical elements depicted in the paper cutouts with a wide range of colors, allowing visitors to experience a visual and immersive recreation of the passage of time. The work effectively began “running” at sunrise on the opening day of the exhibition (November 16, 2017 at 6:30 A.M.). The colors of the day were then traced over a total of 799 minutes, passing through twilight at 6:11 P.M. and finally into darkness after sunset at 7:49 P.M. Moureaux explains: “This flow of time is perceived through the transitional journey through 100 shades of colors.”

All of the numbers featured in the work hang down from the ceiling in strands and are arranged in a grid-like pattern, although this cannot be discerned by the visitor, who passes through a tunnel that cuts through the dense mass of numbers from one side to the other. At its front face, “Color of Time” begins with the lighter colors to represent the start of the day. From there, spectators walk through the rest of the 100-layer volume, watching the minutes run from left to right and then backwards through the installation. Eventually, they’ll emerge at the matrix’s far end, by which point they will have passed through the entire spectrum of color and find themselves surrounded by a series of black numbers.

This marks the first time that Moureaux has ever used this kind of severe color contrast in her work. The artist’s statement on the installation reads: “Through the tunnel, the sky is tinted with a beautiful gradation changing from pale to deep colors, flowing from time to time. The installation makes one feel the subtle changes in the atmosphere through the whole body by travelling the colorful flow of time.”

Visitors can also expect to find a chair by contemporary designer Shiro Kuramata at the end of that tunnel. The chair is called “Miss Blanche,” and the museum has stated that “Miss Blanche is placed by the deputy director of Toyama Prefectural Museum of Art & Design, who is also curator of the exhibition, to create the axis to express a deep respect and admiration from Emmanuelle to Shiro Kuramata.”

“Color of Time” was originally on display from November 16th, 2017 to January 8th, 2018.

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With no time display, this minimalist wooden clock design won’t give you anxiety about how much time you have left to sleep if you wake up and glance at it in the middle of the night. It will, however, awaken you at a set time in a rather unusual and potentially disturbing way: with the sounds of a woodpecker.

The Alarming Clock by Natalie Duckett and Lee Murray features alarms to signal both ends of the sleep cycle, providing an alert when it’s time to get ready for bed as well as in the morning. A digital time display is hidden in the base, but accessible when you need it.

But it’s the manner with which The Alarming Clock wakes you up that makes it so unusual: it has a wooden ‘beak’ that emulates the tapping of a woodpecker.

The exact sounds the clock makes vary depending on what you place it next to. A soft surface might produce a very gentle sound, a hollow glass will ring, and a heavy object will make you think there’s really a woodpecker pecking away right beside your bed.

From Mocoloco:

“The Alarming Clock is made from natural materials to reflect that sleep is a natural process. Each clock is hand crafted from oak and assembled on a made-to-order basis. Touch sensitive technology means users can easily switch off the alarm when rising and shining from a full night’s sleep.”

“The Alarming Clock is the creation of Scottish designers Natalie Duckett and Lee Murray. Founder Natalie explains: ‘The Alarming Clock is a development of my original design and concept launched as a university project back in 2010. Due to the amount of interest I received I decided to keep working on it and develop it into a product that could be sold.’”

“Lee talks about how the clock has been developed: ‘A lot of the success from the original Alarming Clock celebrated the fact that the clock’s time face had been completely removed and this had to be continued. The time face is still not on show but has been discretely placed on the underside of the product.'”

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The rush of the crowd bustling down the street seems a series of particles to those standing and watching in real time. Strip away color and let time lapse, though, and the effect is downright spooky – haunted urban centers, crisp in backdrop but populated with ominous ghouls.

The work of Alexey Titarenko displaces persons, or, conversely, calls attention to their fleeting presence in built environments. His spooky Time Standing Still long exposure photo series from the late 1990s is in large part what drew broader public attention to this increasingly famous photographer, followed by Cities of Shadow and other explorations of humanity in the context of urbanism.

Beyond the jarring first-impression effect of his first forays into non-standard photography, however, his techniques (and subjects) have evolved with time. Subsequent shoots have toyed with more timeless questions of composition, light and shadow in increasingly complex ways.

Titarenko graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Department of Cinematic and Photographic Art from Leningrad’s Institute of Culture in early 1980s, but it would not be before the end of the decade that he could (as a Russian citizen) declare himself an artist and divorce his work from the state propaganda machines. Subsequently, however, his pieces have been hung at dozens of museums  and shown at countless exhibitions around the world.

“I vividly remember the first image, taken at the entrance to the Vasileostrovskaya metro station, located in an old neighborhood, surrounded by factories and shipyards. For the daily commute, the metro was the only public transport in service during this period of crisis. The train is deep underground—more than a two hundred feet—because the soil is so unstable, and access to the platforms is by way of a seemingly interminable escalator. When the escalator broke down, as often happened, entry to the station was restricted to avoid a dangerous crush. At rush hour a crowd of several thousand people would accumulate outside and in waves this human tide climbed up the stairs leading to the entrance of the impressive building on high ground, as was generally the case for most metro stations in Leningrad. Barricaded behind its glass doors, a few policemen were trying desperately to contain the masses of people. In vain, because the crowds were determined to enter at all costs, even if it meant losing a button or a shoe. People pushed, yelled, threw punches. Handicapped people were trampled. It was like a scene from hell. “

“As I watched, shocked and appalled, a musical air emerged in my head, a fragment of Shostakovich that brought me to tears. Not thinking consciously about what I would do, I set up a camera in front of the crowd. No one paid any attention. The exposure time exceeded several minutes and I pretended to wait, to read something in my notebook. Then someone jostled me and I closed the shutter. In the evening, looking at the negative, I experienced the same emotional shock I had felt when the Shostakovich melody came into my mind: deeply moved, almost in tears, but also filled with enthusiasm and excitement. Depicting the crowd as a general movement with erased secondary movements, the metaphor created by the long-exposure effect, made evident certain fixed elements that would otherwise have been drowned in an abundance of details and faces. Yet these were exactly the elements—hands on the stairway rail, for example—that moved me, provoking in me an intense emotional pain I felt at the time as well as a wave of love toward the crowd.”

“The mass of indistinct faces symbolized a precise moment that I had witnessed, but there was more to it.  Similar episodes came to mind: wars and revolutions the Russians had suffered throughout their history. It was as if one photograph had embraced a decade, even a century. I felt that my childhood dream of capturing on film a state of the soul or a singular impression experienced in the street had come true—reality as I had felt and imagined it had been recreated. It was this notion of time—as if introduced in a slightly “mechanical” way while keeping the shutter open as long as possible—that transformed what would otherwise be just a simple “document” about a particular era into an actual visionary oeuvre.”

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Divide and conquer your junk, one day and bag at a time. While not exactly a sustainable long-term solution to waste collection and disposal, it does put pressure on high-use households to keep trash to a minimum.

The calendar by Yurko Gutsulyak is divided into twelves rolls of 28, 30 or 31 rolls to fit each month, then subdivided into four sets to match the seasons, each with printed dates to keep track.

A real test of self-evaluation: one could keep each set, tightly enclosed of course, or at least measure each day’s bag before discarding it (weight and/or size) to track the ebbs and flows of domestic garbage production. For critics who call it materially wasteful, well, perhaps it is – but if you look how little material actually goes into it, you can imagine how easy it would be to learn enough about and adjust your habits to offset it.

“Every calendar day is a new trash bag. Every month is a roll of 31, 30 or 28 trash bags. The Calendar consists of 12 rolls and is divided into 4 quarterly sets with 3 months-rolls. The date is printed on every bag so that you can see it when the bag is placed into the trash bin. We created this calendar like self-promotion of our studio. Main message is that design is worth-while. Design should surround us every time and everywhere. And if design is based on a good idea, it really works and has power to influence people and their activity. Design defines modernity.”

The text on the calendar reads:

“All graphic design products ultimately end up in trash. And many more ideas remain just ideas. We believe that the design idea in each project should have the power to act and be effective during its short life. Only this way design really matters. Only when we create ideas that are able to change the world our life matters. Then, we do not regret a day, as we did not waste it.”

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White walls can be a boring waste of space during the day, dull and dark by night . Why not add some color and life, use them to project your schedule, adjust your social calender, view the weather and tell time on demand? This clever little all-in-one gadget proposes to do all of the above, and perhaps even more.

Yonggu Do, Dohyung Kim & Sewon Oh fashioned the device as a simple circular attachment – an unobtrusive, wall-mounted object that is activated by touch or via remote connection. Bluetooth, WIFI, and more – these days, all easy add-ons. A music player (with laser-light display of what you are listening to) would not be difficult either.

A series of lasers project digital information onto the flat surface surrounding the sundial, using familiar frames of reference for things like numerals one expects to see at a certain angle from center (making it easier to read from a distance, knowing the positions of hours and minutes and the relative size of the hands).

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Tea drinking is a nearly-timeless tradition that spans the globe, particularly popular during these cold months of the year when we like to huddle around the table with a warm beverage. But the question of the tea bag still begs for integrated design ideas.

The Tie Tea cup (read it aloud to get the double meaning) has two small notches in the site around which one can wrap the string associated with most standard tea bags. No more worrying about having to reach in and retrieve a lost string and holding tag, thanks to this simple tooth-like solution.

Jonas Trampedach proposes a final resting place for your finished tea bag – a coffin, of sorts, in which to put it out of the way and out of sight. A secret bag-shaped impression in the ceramic saucer below your cup lets you hide this unwanted element when its usefulness is at an end.

Why present them in tandem? Well, they both address similar issues of usability but … think about it: there is no reason not to combine these two designs into one, either. A Tie Tea Cup and a Tea Bag Coffin Saucer would work great together for during and after a tea-drinking season. For fun, here are two more tea-bag-oriented cup designs.

The Tie Tie Mug is available for purchase at Gessato, if you’d like one of your very own.

“It’s time to let tea bag fishing into the past. The ingenious Tie Tea Mug draws inspiration from boat dock cleats to keep tea bags firmly anchored to the mug’s rim. Designed by George Lee, founder of le mouton noir & co., the mug has a beautifully simple but clever design. It features two notches at the rim that provide a convenient solution to tie a tea bag securely. That way, it will never float away in your tea and make you fish it out from the mug with a spoon. Made of porcelain, the Tie Tea Mug holds about 12 ounces of tea and is conveniently microwave-safe. Available in a right handed version.”

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Digital clocks have come so far – great features, bright easy-to-read numerals and multi-functional alarms … but on many, switching to or from daylight savings time still involves buttons, adjustments and double-checks.

Not so with this super-simple design solution: just tilt the table clock from one small flat side to the other and be done with it. For one half of the year it leans left, and the other half it sits slightly to the right.

The resulting slightly-asymmetrical shape shows off its one core bit of creativity functionality, while otherwise-minimal white and black (alternately used for the hands and ticks or background) make a subtle-but-stylish design statement.

But wait, you want a watch instead? Other designs by Denis Guidone are also fun, simple and abstract in various ways … include a watch that follows the same style and single-turn principle for moving forward or back by an hour.

The post Flip to Switch: Minimalist Clock Solves Daylight Savings Time first appeared on Dornob.

Pattern recognition is the driving principle of this perplexing design idea – it looks like a mess of black lines on a white background up close, but your focus converges on the recognizable numerals within a chaotic landscape of senseless pieces.

The least-broken number tells you what you need to know on the hour side, while the rotating hand remains your guide to minutes. One comment here: reversing these might have been a good call – after all, we know time by the dial as fast or faster than we recognize it by a circle of numbers.

That small critique aside, however, the concept is quite creative and one could imagine being able to eventually read this better and faster than a normal wall clock – particularly interesting given that, at first, it looks like the most confusing time-telling device ever constructed.

At 2000 dollars, the ‘Shattered Clock‘ does not come cheap – but, to be fair, there are a lot of moving parts, and the design is unique (and expensive) enough you can bet you won’t find it on a friend’s wall anytime soon … assuming you can afford it in the first place!

The post Chaos Wall Clock Tells Time in Constantly-Breaking Numbers first appeared on Dornob.

Wall clock, calendar and mortality reminder all wrapped up in one odd work of (post)modern art. The so-called ‘Chrono Shredder’ provides a palpable (or pulp-able?) physical reminder that all things are temporary, and we can never wind back time in this world. The artist fittingly describes it as a “poetic time machine.”

Created by Susanna Hetrich, the simple red box shreds each day’s calendar page as it passes, and leaves the tangled paper strands to curl, bunch and pile up on the floor in a messy heap. This fits right in the middle of her portfolio of creative work, which ranges from abstract installation artworks to apparel and photography.

She considers the calendar a kind of performance art piece (albeit robotic rather than human in nature), and it is never stationary: each day slowly shreds in realtime so that minute changes are visible even on an hourly or second-to-second basis if one is watching closely. While not yet for sale, she does have plans to release a limited-edition version at some time in the future.

More from the artist

“Chrono-shredder is a poetic time machine that reminds us of the momentariness of our life time. Every single day is slowly shredded as time passes by. All that time that is irreversibly lost, receives a tangible presence in the form of shredded paper. As the minutes tick by, the tattered remains of the past pile up under the device. One day is shredded within 24 hours. A shredding pulse is activated very 3 minutes. The device auto-synchronizes at midnight each day. Once started, the Chrono-Shredder automatically and continously shreds the days as time goes by.”

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Civilizations rise and cities fall, but the time it takes softens the sense of change – except in rare cases in which we are confronted with both visions at the same time – as in the fictional reconstruction of Manhattan Island, past and present, shown above. Some photographers, however, have captured entirely real images from the same locations prior to a war, following a devastating disaster, or before and after a radical reconstruction project. For places in the world like Haiti facing the former, there remains a great deal of hope in the latter.

Past Destruction & Disaster: Many may think of Afghanistan as a war-torn wasteland, a desert nation utterly unlike the Western World. This revealing image shows vividly just how different the place truly was just four short decades ago. Where once there were all the architectural trappings of contemporary civilization as we know it there are now only overgrown weeds, broken stone blocks and a dusty gravel road.

Present Reconstruction & Rebirth: But all is not lost – there are remarkable tales of transition that run in exactly the opposite direction, such as the rebuilding of Europe following the Second World War. Pictured above are London, Warsaw and Dresden (from top to bottom) as seen directly following the conflict and much more recently – one would never known from the new photos that these places had seen such incredible strife. They’re completely transformed.

Future Buildings & Cities: What a difference a day makes – or in some cases a decade. Dubai may have grown too fast, its economy buckling under its own weight, but the development has nonetheless been fascinating for all of us watching from the outside. It is stunning how quickly a desert erupted into a luxury city – but will it remain that way or fade back into the dust? We shall see. (via Oobject)

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