“Time is what keeps everything from happening at once”
“Time is the rate at which we live – the speed at which we successively pass through our existence from birth to death. Time is a rate of life-progress, different for every individual, and only made standard because we take the time-duration of the earth’s revolution around the sun, which is constant.”
Retrieved from “The Girl in the Golden Atom” By Ray Cummings
Idea process
These two paragraphs that retrieved from “The Girl in the Golden Atom” has inspired me a lot. Starting with the definition of time, I think that time is a human creation system that makes everything happens in an orderly sequence, and thus makes everything in that moment to be specific and unique. For example, the sun you can see out of the window is not the sun you are seeing right now because light takes time to reach us. That is why things are independent and ordered in sequences according to time (the past, now or future). Besides that, the starting of an individual’s time is when he is born and the ending of the time is when he dies. So this link to the life process from born to death. Birth is an addition to the family and death is a physical subtraction from the family. So this ends up to “FAMILY”.
Concept
My concept for TIME project is to design my own genealogy to demonstrate the order and seniority in my family. Also, discover the relationships between my family and the extended family based on the year of birth and generation. As this topic is very interesting to me because it is a sense of my responsibility to preserve the past for future generations and a sense of self-satisfaction in accurate storytelling in time. My ideal plan is to start from my grandparents, my father’s generation, my generation and the younger generation. There are 4 generations in total. It is interesting because there are some special cases happened in my family. For example, the age gap between my father and my cousin is quite near, and my nieces are older than me. So I would want to include this in my design too.
Other mindmaps
I found a very interesting calendar called Chinese Gender Chart which used to predict the gender of an unborn child based on two variables: the baby’s month of conception and the mother’s age. This 7,000-year-old chart, which is said to have been devised by an ancient Chinese scientist, was apparently discovered buried in a royal tomb near Beijing, about 700 years back. Its accuracy rate is said to be above 90 percent but till now there is no any scientific prove. Even though this is very interesting and fresh, however, there is limited research resource therefore I found very hard to continue on this topic.
Retrieved from: http://www.buzzle.com/articles/chinese-lunar-calendar-gender-predictor-chart.html