With sundials on my mind from last week, I thought it would be fun to do a clock face design that communicates time with respect to sunrise/sunset.
While calculated sunrise/sunset and standard clock time underlie the clock, on the face of it it’s not about communicating the numerical time, but rather time with relation to the sunrise/sunset, so I chose to leave out the numbers and include just one hand that makes a full rotation each day. The light and dark on the underlying dial would change depending on the sunset/sunrise times for the current location and time of year.
I decided to put the dark part of the dial (indicating night) face downward because it felt like that fit with the idea of the sun climbing up the sky and then dipping below the horizon. Even though it’s not exact, the end of the hand has some parallel with the position of the sun in its arc across the sky (if the observer is facing north).
Thinking about different visualizations of space, I want to try doing something that keeps the mechanism of turning but isn’t based around the face of a circle; I from this, I thought about a piece of a scrolling tape, like in a cassette. Thinking of tape also brought to mind measuring tape, and so what I ended up with resembles a scrolling time ruler:
The numbers scroll from bottom to top, while the indicator in the center stays still relative to the window. I subdivided by seconds and included a little over a full minute, so that an hour:minute reading will always be visible. I put the indicator in red so it would stand out more, and went with a sans-serif font for easy readability since there are a lot of numbers.
I feel like my personal perception of time, is tightly bound to my cycles of sleep/wakefulness, which can get easily disrupted when I have a busy schedule. With that in mind, I thought of a timekeeper that tells time around your sleep.
Inspired by Mary’s timekeeping ring and sleep tracking rings like this one: https://ouraring.com/, I decided to lean into the idea of this timekeeper as a ring. The ring would use biometric readings, similar to the Oura, to tell when its wearer wakes up and goes to sleep, but then rather than communicating with an app and portraying a lot of information, it focuses on telling its wearer one thing: how long it’s been since they had a full night of sleep.
This ring would indicate your wakeful time by changing color on the outside, like a mood ring; green when you first wake up after a full restful sleep, then blue, then fading to purple and black when you’ve been awake for a long time. Sleeping triggers the ring to recharge and fade back towards green.