In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that within a century, technology would shrink the working week to fifteen hours, leaving us twenty-five additional hours of leisure. Almost a hundred years later, and several technological revolutions in, AI seems destined to deliver that promise once again.
Until now, all our efforts to eradicate work have resulted in its intensification. Rather than the peaceful prospect of a working week running from Monday to Tuesday, we might be facing a job crisis, where fewer people work more intensely, and the rest have to reorient themselves.
Depending on the situation time can be experienced very differently. Technology can alter our perception. Some days slip through our fingers, others refuse to pass. An evening on a smartphone collapses into a single moment, while ten minutes of waiting stretch endlessly. Through notifications, infinite feeds, and productivity tools, the devices around us shape how fast and how full our time feels. If design can compress time, it can also expand it.
Your studio inquiry invites exploration of time as a design material. What would we do at -1 a.m. in the morning, or the 32nd of December? Who gets to keep the time that technology saved? Create interactions, products and systems that consider and shape how we perceive, spend, or safeguard time, resulting in designs that open up new ways of inhabiting the hours we already have.
Kick-Off: 12.10. 2-4pm R402
Monday and Tuesday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Prof. Aeneas Stankowski
WM Lukas Henneberger
This Entwurfskurs is part of the designing_ai lab, a research and teaching project funded by Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre.
