Poster Statement

Everyone who ever saw the film ‘The Time Machine’ from H.G Wells, knows the scene where Rod Taylor sits in his machine and looks in the window of a womens fashion shop. Because he is travelling through time you see the dressed puppets in the windows rapidly changing clothes. A change of fashion during years can be seen in one minute! This method of time-lapse creates a special feeling and notion of time. You see something that you probably never would see in your life-time and it creates a special knowledge. I strongly belief that the ‘new visual language’ everyone is talking about, will be one where time will play a more important role than we think of now. In VR products because people can virtually travel through time-related databases e.g. seeing how things evolve in time (the growing of plants in a timeframe while you walk around in the forest in real time!). In interactive products the ‘real time’ can be used to literally design the user interface people look at. To give an example. When you start-up the Albert Heijn TeleCD-i (of which I was the designer and art-director.) TeleCD-i made it possible to buy grocery goods at home and have them delivered, it depends on the time (the internal clock in the CD-i player) what you hear and see. In the evening you have another background and more easylistening music than during the daytime, (this was only implemented in the main menu). Currently I am working on more examples of ‘designing with time’. One of them is a CD-ROM where time will be one of the major factors, influencing virtually every aspect of the surroundings, buildings and events the users ‘walk’ in. Subject of this postersession will be the following statements / items:

1. The use of ‘time’ for knowledge is an underdevelopped subject.
2. Time can be divided in ‘subjective time’ and ‘objective time’
3. Time can be a trigger to introduce new situations and surroundings
4. Time will be a navigation tool in interactive and VR productions of the future (time machines as navigation tools)

• Léon C.M. Wennekes, Netherlands, FCC/Wennekes Multimedia bv. Since 1983 I am involved in the new media. first as a designer and presently as a consultant in the field of multimedia (CDmedia, internet and the like). I have been working in this area since the early 1990’s and
  have developed numerous interactive products since: CD-i, CD-ROM and networked interactivity including the development of an interactive ‘service’ surrounding. Here people can obtain special services and products that are tailormade for interactive situations: e.g. you can buy products but there is a lot of personal service around it as a result of databases
  where personal favours and habits are tracked, stored and used to create new services.
  I am of the opinion that several new services WIII ‘sprout’ in this area in the years to come.

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