📖 Personal Reader
Personal Reader & Bibliography
For the Special issue 27, I read some articles and books related to Time and the time perception system, but I did not find as much as topics or themes. Inspired by the last assessment, I think finding an alternative structure to explain the system is interesting, and investigating the relationship between dominant systems and alternative experiences that exist alongside them. I am trying to get a sidetrack from the mainstream.
How do alternative systems form within and alongside dominant structures? What methodologies might make invisible experiences visible or sensible? How might we recognise and value forms of work and experience that resist conventional measurement?
Curiosity?
1. Moments of unexpected connection
2. The tension between different experiential dimensions
3. The embodied nature of abstract concepts
4. The politics embedded in seemingly neutral systems
Research Directions?
1. Alternative economies of Care and Maintenance - How repair, maintenance, and care work create systems of value outside market economics
2. Embodied Knowledge and Measurement - How bodies know and experience reality differently than standardised metrics suggest
3. Resistance and Adaptation Within Systems - How individuals and communities both work within and resist dominant structures
4. The Politics of standardisation and measurement - How seemingly neutral systems of measurement encode power relationships
5. Material-Social Relationships Beyond Capitalism - How relationships between people and material environments might be structured differently
Investigate?
1. Hidden relationalities within established structures
2. Embodied experiences that resist standardization
3. Alternative frameworks that challenge dominant systems
4. Material-social practices that remain unnoticed
Trying to find out?
1. I am exploring how repair work forms a system "mending the shortage of capitalism" and how workers create "micro-rituals to resist the regulation of factory." So how do alternative systems form within and alongside dominant structures?
2. I want to quantify and make visible/sensiable subjective experiences that normally remain personal and unmeasured. What methodologies might make invisible experiences visible?
3. How might we recognize and value forms of work and experience that resist conventional measurement? This connects emotional labor, care work, repair work, and subjective time experience – all phenomena that don't fit neatly into standardized metrics.
4. Our perception is shaped by "embodied habitual involvement with the sociomaterial world. What connections exist between bodily experience, social structures, and material reality?
Contribute to the conversation?
1. Methodologies for making the invisible visible
2. Frameworks for understanding the relationship between alternative and dominant systems
3. Ways to recognize and validate experiences that resist standardization
4. Bridges between theoretical critique and embodied experience
book /collection
51 Personae: Tarwewijk
*Collection*
*Synopsis*
Author shows her research around her living area, to find and build a sense of home in a solitary time.
Placing Time, Timing Space: Dismantling the Master’s Map and Clock
*Collection*
Questions to Consider When Encountering Maps & Clocks:
• Who is the mapmaker or clockmaker?
• Who is the intended map/clock user?
• What is the purpose of the map or clock?
• What, if anything, on the map or clock is up for question?
• What is being taken for granted if and when you use the map?
• What temporal landscape does the map/clock embody? What year was it made? Does it still stand the test of time? What has changed? What has remained?
• Where are you in time when you are using the map or clock? What are the intersecting and conflicting temporalities are pulled into your NOW/present when using the map or clock?
• Imagine the boundaries and Contested Boundaries that the map or clock contains. How can they be remapped/redrawn/re-envisioned to be more equitable in time and space?
• What unspoken agreements, understandings, contracts, social constructs, and negotiations are embedded in the map or clock?
• Once we dismantle the master’s clock, what clocks or timekeeping practices will take its place? What already exists that we can learn from? What can we communally create?
*Synopsis*
Rasheedah Phillips is a practicing attorney, author, and the creator of The AfroFuturist Affair. Her work spans across law, speculative fiction, and Afrofuturism. She is the founder of Community Futures Lab, which explores connections between time, space, and community dynamics. Phillips approaches time theory through a unique lens that integrates legal expertise with cultural analysis, particularly examining how time concepts intersect with racial justice.
Phillips provides a critical deconstruction of Western time concepts, revealing how standardized time became an instrument of colonization and oppression. She analyzes how the 1884 International Prime Meridian Conference impacted global time standardization and connects this to the temporal politics of slave emancipation in America, demonstrating how delays in spreading liberation information reflected power structures controlling time. Drawing on Henri Bergson's philosophy, Phillips argues that mechanical clock time fails to capture the dynamic, subjective nature of temporal experience—clocks are "merely symbolic of moments rather than the moments themselves." As an alternative, she proposes "quantum event maps," viewing time as relational and non-linear, integrating African and Asian cultural perspectives. This approach allows events and memories to disconnect from specific calendar dates or clock times, instead weaving time into memory itself.
*For Research*
Phillips' critical deconstruction of time provides a fundamental theoretical foundation for my design work. Her analysis of how standardised time became a tool for colonisation directly connects to my exploration of how social structures and power dynamics shape time perception. Her concept of "quantum event maps" offers a promising alternative framework for my "emeter" device, supporting my goal to help users recognise how their temporal experiences are socially constructed. Phillips' critical questions about maps and clocks—such as "Where are you in time when using the clock?" and "What intersecting and conflicting temporalities are pulled into your 'NOW'?"—have directly inspired the contextualised questionnaire component of my design. Her integration of African and Asian cultural perspectives on time aligns with my interest in reclaiming alternative time perceptions that resist industrial and colonial time frameworks.
Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism
*Collection*
*Synopsis*
Judy Wajcman is a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is a leading scholar in the sociology of technology, with particular expertise in gender relations and technological change. Wajcman has extensively researched how technology shapes and is shaped by social practices, especially in workplace contexts. Her background combines feminist theory with science and technology studies, providing her with a unique perspective on how technological changes affect temporal experiences across different social groups.
Wajcman explores the contemporary "time-pressure paradox": despite technological innovations designed to save time, people increasingly feel time-scarce and harried. She challenges technological determinism, arguing that our experience of time pressure stems not simply from digital technologies but from complex social practices shaping how we use and interpret technology. Wajcman identifies three distinct mechanisms generating time scarcity: substantive time pressure (actual time required to complete tasks), temporal disorganization (difficulty coordinating activities with others), and temporal density (handling multiple tasks and activity intensity).
Her analysis of care work's distinctive temporal quality is particularly crucial—borrowing Karen Davies' concept of "process time", which resists acceleration and operates according to rhythms different from industrial capitalism's linear time. She emphasizes that care work cannot be reduced to linear time measurement because it "involves slowness" and emotional dimensions that resist acceleration. Wajcman also explores gender dimensions of time experience, noting how women's socially ascribed caring roles connect to temporal perceptions and logics very different from those driving the labor market. She ultimately argues that time cannot be viewed as an abstraction divorced from socially situated materiality and embodiment, understanding time as a product of sociomaterial practices rather than an objective entity independent of human experience.
*For Research*
Wajcman's framework provides essential theoretical underpinning for my "emeter" design. Her distinction between clock time and process time directly connects to my core design challenge: how to simultaneously visualize these two time systems and quantify individual experiences of time substance, sequence, and density. The "process time" concept particularly applies to understanding my experiences in art work and food service, fields requiring substantial emotional labor and relational work that resist simple linear time measurement.
Wajcman's identification of three distinct mechanisms generating time scarcity (substantive time pressure, temporal disorganization, and temporal density) offers a concrete analytical framework that I've incorporated into my subjective time scale design. Her sociomaterial approach—viewing time as emerging from "embodied habitual involvement with the sociomaterial world"—validates my research premise that subjective time experience is shaped by spatial, cultural, economic, and technological factors. Her analysis of how care work and emotional labor operate according to different temporal logics directly informs my interest in making visible how different activities alter our temporal perception in ways that resist industrial time measurement.
Hidden Labor and the Delight of Otherness: Design and Post-Capitalist Politics
*Collection*
The labor of modifying and repairing the work of others is certainly not groundbreaking in terms of anti-capitalist struggle per se. However, the physical skills, the attitude of care and circumspection, the inscription of a hand that performs “responsible” gestures, and so forth, all engender a shared authorship –in this case a cooperation between the absent architect’s and/or construction company’s work and the subsequent, careful labor of detecting and correcting the building’s design problems. This cooperation is neither contractually negotiated nor socially expected, but instead results from a specific situation in which a problem called for a solution. It is inseparable from local conditions and constraints, and should not be taken as a model for action. Yet, on other hand, it is intriguing, as it displays relationalities within material-social practices that usually remain unnoticed, and whose resourcefulness is thus overlooked.
*Synopsis*
It is talking about the phenomenon in which hidden labour formed a system, mending the shortage of capitalism. After all, it also raised a question: Could hidden labour—artisan be a way to resist capitalism? The author didn't give an answer but raised several potential problems; the relationship of material and the labour system could find an alternative way to think about it.
Banana time
*Collection*
*Synopsis*
The anthropology thesis about industrial workers create micro-rituals to resist the regulation of factory.
世界マヌケ反乱の手引書: ふざけた場所の作り方
- Collection of texts/works (in whichever way you would like to include it (section/whole text/...), How is the original present in the reader?)
- Synopsis * - Why is this important to my research/work * - Annotations and notes --> format: up to you
Annotated bibliography exercise:
- Pick 2 or 3 references (they are not fixed or set in stone, don't spend too much time picking the best references) - Write a synopsis (even if you haven't read it yet) *
- P.S.: Include contextualization on author's background and expertise
- Why is this important to your research/work *
Concept/ Questions about si27
1. The critical theory questioning industrial/colonial/capitalist temporal structures
2. The shared time experiences of emotional labour
3. The creative design tools to visualise subjective time
4. The maintenance works reveal hidden systems of repair
5. The digital anthropology of examining technology's temporal effects
6. The methodology of measuring different qualities of time
7. The cultural theory of alternative temporal frameworks
8. The Technological History relates to Emotional/Care Labor
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How does subjective time experience resist or adapt to mechanical clock time systems established through colonialism and capitalism?
What unique temporal qualities emerge in work requiring significant emotional labor, and how do these qualities challenge conventional time measurement?
How might we visualize the tension between biological rhythms and standardized clock time to reveal personal and cultural time politics?
How do forms of hidden and unacknowledged labour operate within alternative temporal frameworks that both support and potentially resist capitalist time discipline?
How do digital technologies simultaneously promise time efficiency while creating new forms of temporal density and disorganization?
What methodologies might effectively measure and compare substantive time pressure, temporal disorganisation, and temporal density across different types of labour?
How might non-Western and queer perspectives on time offer alternatives to capitalist temporal frameworks?