Time told by people
In our brains, we organise time in flashes of memory. It’s about the moments we remember – not the hour and minute that an event occurred. So why aren’t clocks like that? Could we tell the time by looking at a City's shared experiences? The Human clock was a concept I created to allow me to play with that idea, and with lots of help from my team at iQ Labs, we brought the idea to life in just under 3 weeks in out of office hours time.
Cobbled together with off the shelf items from IKEA, the local hardware store, and a liberal use of power tools, the team turned the back meeting room into a makeshift joinery.
For a bunch of pixel pushers, it was a rare opportunity to get our hands dirty with 'real work'.
Using Instagram’s API, the Human Clock takes a feed from any location and tracks images shared across the globe. Set the clock to the place you want and you’ll get a visual stream from that City.
You'll know that it's night time in Tokyo, as more photos of neon signs start to appear on screen. That New York is waking up because tourists are taking early morning snaps from Brooklyn Bridge. Or that it’s lunch time in Dublin because of all the pics of fresh pints of Guinness ordered in bars.
Built using Raspberry Pi, Arduino boards and a couple of wifi dongles, the Human Clock is an installation I designed to support iQ Content's ongoing experimentation with the internet of things. With super-cheap components and a little coding time, we were able to piece together the clock over a few sessions at our Maker Friday workshops.