I collaborated with Iza Paez for this project. We both knew that we wanted to make something conceptual and simple. We wanted to make people think about the relationship between energy consumption and resource depletion. We started brainstorming what the idea of being green mean to us and we both agreed that being green is actually a luxury. If you are lucky enough to be born in an improved society probably your society consumes much more energy than unimproved societies and that is why being green becomes important. We wanted to symbolize the luxury with a clock because as a society improves every minute becomes even more important. Also we wanted to show people that by consuming resources you are consuming planet’s future.

As a result our first design idea was as following sketch:

There would be two ways for the viewers to interact with this installation: either flip a switch or turn the gear. By flipping the switch user would be powering the clock with the grid electricity (consuming resources) so the clock would start moving clockwise (wasting future). By turning the gear the user would be powering the clock with kinetic energy by generating electricity through a DC motor and the clock would start moving counterclockwise (giving back time).

The interactive part of the circuit consists of two dc motors a switch and 2 rectifiers.

We discussed how we can improve on the design and decided that we wanted a minimalist design so the concept can be portrayed even stronger. One of important decisions was to use recycled wood and materials as much as we can. Also we decided to put white LEDs behind the clock to symbolize the relationship between time and energy even stronger.

We decided to have a plain circle instead of a gear to simplify the design.

Also we wanted this installation to be hanging on the wall to strengthen the notion of a clock.