Description

I developed a clock that tracks the rise and fall of tides. It adheres to our mental models of an analog clock, but only uses the height of water to determine passing time, instead of numeric. This may alter the way one keeps track of time because it makes the concept of the passage of time more fluid (no pun intended). Tracking tidal oscillation is still "accurate," but is more grounded in nature's processes, rather than relying on the construct we've made for modern-day time.

Design Process

When thinking of the concept of time tracking, three main ideas came to mind:

• 1. The first revolved around the phrase, "it's five o'clock somewhere," which would include a map that denotes where in the world it is 5:00pm, signaling the end of the workday, or an excuse to begin happy hour
• 2. The second idea, which is the one developed above, was tracking the ocean shore's tidal movements. I will go more into detail below.
• 3. The third idea was a clock with a single marker to represent the sun. The "clock" would consist of two arcs: light and dark. The idea was to make the dark arc move depending on how long the nights are, using sunrise/sunset times.

See below for the initial sketches:

For the tidal clock, I built the analog model based off of p5.js' example of a clock. Instead of numbers, the clock denotes either high-tide and low-tide every six hours. From there, I mapped the hours to the height of the canvas and created two variables to play with the height of water: tideRise to go from low tide to high tide, and tideSink to go from high tide to low tide. The height of the rectangle, or water, changes with these two variables. tideRise and tideSink also contain conditionals based on the computer's time of day, divided into six hour blocks to correlate with the tides' increments.

Reflection

This clock required messing around with conditionals and the map function in order to get it right. In a way, I performed my own map() function while building out the tide rise and fall, by mapping out how the water would behave in seconds first, then translated it to hours. From this project, I learned how to scale my own thought processes and constructs. Overall, creating a clock that still tracks a natural process reminded me of the many ways in which we perceive the passage of time, and the imposed objectivity we have places on universal time. A more subjective method of timekeeping doesn't necessarily equate to inaccuracy.