Brief
In this project, we require to explore the design potential in the abstract and invisible properties of gravity. In addition, we also need to think about how the human body reacts to gravity in a different way as well as how to let our user experience gravity. For this project, we used body storming and behavioural mapping as research methods which contextualize our design in terms of environment, interactions and objects during our design process.
Group members: Zoe; Hugh; Winnie; Chun Li.
Brainstorm
We decided to organize brainstorming sessions at the beginning of the project and this is because the more ideas we generate, the wider choice it gains. In my opinion, we can get lots of inspirations of gravity from the specific exercise and the specific environment, such as skateboarding as well as an amusement park. People's movement usually changes many times which is in order to anti-gravity when they play skateboarding. Similar to the skateboarding, pilates yoga also used fixed ribbon to help people do complicated movements in the air. Therefore, I think the way that people try to anti-gravity is an extremely interesting point to develop.
Sketch & Picture: Zoe Yan
After the group discussion, one of my group members came up with an idea which connects gravity and time. To be more specific, according to the theory: Gravitational Time Dilation, gravity can change time and time runs slower wherever gravity is strongest. Therefore, we supposed different generations' feeling of time might be influenced by gravity.
Behavioural mapping
Considering the diversity of age groups, we decided to do our behavioural mapping in the Elephant & Castle Community Park. And the reason why we used behavioural mapping is that it can determine how different generations use a designed space and track their movement within the space itself to some extent. Each member of us responsible for one group and we all need to spend 30mins to record our age groups' movement by drawing and video-taking.
Picture: Zoe Yan & Chun Li
According to the locational or temporal patterns of behaviours record, we found that children's range of activities is larger than the elderly people within a certain period of time. In addition, children didn't spend lots of time in one recreation facility. Conversely, elders stayed in one place for a long time.
For the further research, I randomly found young people and some elderly people around the school and asked them to participate my experiment, they need to put their hands up when they think one minute time up. Finally, the result showed that young people put their hands up much faster than the elder.
During the mapping stage, we did some body-storming to develop ideas for mapping the experience of time. Probably our most useful body-storm was having one of us play the role of a black hole, and have the others moving at different distances around it at different speeds, combining the experience of time given your age with the effect of gravity on time itself. This idea was reflected in our map and in our final presentation as you can see in the video at the end.
Picture: Zoe Yan & Chun Li
We assumed that the speed of time people perceived may relate to the Special Relativity theory. The gravity is stronger the closer people are to the surface it means their feet are younger than their heads. Therefore, people who perceived time quickly, they may have less gravity than others. Besides, the more gravity accelerates a body the slower its subjective time in comparison to the still-standing frame of reference, the slower it ages. As shown in the image, people who perceive time differently and have a variety of movement may in different space-time.
Picture: Zoe Yan
Human's perception of time
After our experiments and observations, we had a question: "Why Does Time Seem to Speed Up with Age?" Some research seems to have answered our question, for example, the "Holiday Paradox" explicit that how we perceive time, to be more specific, humans can estimate the length of an event from two very different perspectives: a prospective vantage, while an event is still occurring, or a retrospective one, after it has ended and in retrospect, time seems to pass more quickly the older we get.
Another factor in time’s perceived passage is how the brain develops. As the brain and body grow more complex and there are more neural connections, the pathways that information travels are increasingly complicated. The branch like a tree and this change in processing influence our experience of time.
After reading relevant theories we found our previous assumption deviated from that, so we rethought the relationship between gravity and space-time.
After reading relevant theories we found our previous assumption deviated from that, so we rethought the relationship between gravity and space-time.
After reading relevant theories we found our previous assumption deviated from that, so we rethought the relationship between gravity and space-time.
Picture: Winnie
This display board showed a 2D translation of the body storming we did, and the black hole represents an extremely strong force of gravity, different shapes are points in the space.
Regardless of the age, people who are closer to the earth have stranger gravity and he/ she can experience the time slower than people who stay in space, relatively speaking, this is known as gravitational time dilation.
The Experience Of Gravity: Gravity Bracelets
Our experience seeks to make physical the notion of gravitational time dilation. Each bracelet represents a gravity strength, blue is 1G, red is 5G, yellow is 10G, and the white is 0G, using no bracelet as a base measurement.
So the task for the volunteer is to try to get to the prize (pineapple) with four different forces affecting their performance. As gravity increases, time runs more slowly. The bracelets with a higher gravitational force impede the user, meaning it takes longer for them to complete the task.
Under 0Gs, time runs very quickly, so the task can be completed rapidly, representing the speed of time. 10G is the highest, and it takes the participant longest to get their hand through the tunnel, representing the slowest passage of time.
Sketch & Picture: Zoe Yan
The Experience Of Gravity: Drinking milk game
The second idea we want to use different milk bottles as well as different capacities of milk to represent the intensity of gravity of different age groups. However, we found that it was not very scrupulous if we divide people into different age groups to explore gravity, and then we decided to reject it.
Sketch & Picture: Winnie
Final presentation
Reflection
The direction we chose to study which is the relationship between time and gravity is actually a very difficult one to do research and it also led to the fact that the assumptions we proposed at the beginning were not rigorous. At the same time, our group cooperation also appeared some problems. Therefore, this project is also a challenge for me. In my opinion, the gravity experience that we designed didn't really express what we were thinking at the beginning, and the game of feeling the magnetic force was too simple to express our ideas. Therefore, in future cooperation, it is very important to adopt the opinions of team members. Besides, it is also significant to find sufficient theoretical basis to support our ideas.