Time, and the Ecological
Futures of Everyday Living

By Yejin Eun

Time, and the Ecological Futures
of Everyday Living
By Yejin Eun
BBA, Jeonbuk National University, 2017

Supervisor Craig Badke

A critical and process documentation thesis paper submitted
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF DESIGN

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN
2023

This thesis is written in APA (American Psychological Association) Style 7th edition.
© Yejin Eun, 2023

Abstract
Time, and the Ecological Futures of Everyday Living
Between entering grad school in a new country and starting a new job,
I found it difficult to continue the low-impact lifestyle I had been used to
back home. Amplified pressure to use my time economically made it more
challenging to practice held values and beliefs to minimize waste, seek out
ethical products, and learn ways to live locally within seasonal rhythms.
In the seemingly unstoppable stream of globalisation, industrialisation,
modernisation, and urbanisation, it feels inconceivable to imagine how to live
slowly with less; less artifacts, less conveniently, less productively, and less
efficiently, in the pursuit of care and empathy with other-than-humans and
our shared habitat. Quantified and synced by atomic clocks, phone screens,
scheduling calendars, and unified time zones around the prime meridian,
immerse us in a quantified, universalized, global, linear, progressive flow of
time, whose pervasiveness can blind us to the ways our lives are structured
around it, the values it is built upon, and the priorities it sets for economies,
governments, societies, and individuals alike.
Acknowledging time as a given frame of the world, this thesis seeks to
explore the complex ways time shapes everyday living conditions in the hopes
that other conceptions and awareness of time might open us up to other
possibilities for more ecological ways of relating to and living in our world.
Through exploring, tracing, and defamiliarizing time, this research attempts
to better understand the simplified, automatic, and economically measured
interactions with time that might be keeping us from living more ecologically
value-driven and relational interpretations of time. Exploring a mix of
immersion in different practices, making to reflect, visualizing to
communicate, questioning, and navigating the gaps of understanding, this
project of time seeks to reveal and defamiliarize our taken-for-granted
notions of time.

Keywords
Time, Modernity, Traditional Knowledge, Exploratory Design,
Ecological Perspective, Diagramming

Acknowledgements
This exploratory project would not have arrived where it sits today without
the time of others generously offered to me over the past two years.
Thank you to the indigenous communities of the Səlil̓wətaɬ, Skwxwú7mesh,
and xʷməθkwəy̓əm, for the teachings I encountered as a newcomer to their
lands. The stories and wisdom shared with me were a life-altering experience
that opened a deep, reflective space in my way of being, helping me to learn
and unlearn what I know and do not know about the world.
Thank you, Laura Kozak, Connie Watts, Louise St. Pierre, Bonne Zabolotney,
Sophie Gaur, and the many other faculty members, friends, and colleagues
of the Emily Carr community who were part of the inspiring environment.
You offered me a safe space to think, practice, and behave with curiosity as a
creative practitioner. The conversations and contemplations we held together
pushed the boundaries of the limit I unconsciously set.
Thank you to my supervisor Craig Badke. You walked along this journey
of researching time shoulder to shoulder with me, shining a bright light to
navigate the pathway together when it felt like I was sometimes lost in darkness. Your nudges, reasonings, patience and support helped me believe in this
work and find its voice, place, and meaning.
Lastly, thank you to my parents 은희채, 김순애, and partner, Gleb. Without your
unconditional love and encouragement, I would not be where I am today.
I send blessings to all the people and other beings who have sustained the
health of my body and mind to complete this work.

Table of Contents
Abstract
Acknowledgements

Why Time?

7

Time Explorations

13

The Experience of Exploring Time

14

Chapter 1. Time Journaling
Urban, Semester Time
Backcountry Camping, Break Time

18

Chapter 2. Design of Time and Social Priorities
Agricultural, Korean Time
Industrial, Coordinated Universal Time
Chapter 3. Time Traveling through Memories and Knowledge
The Breath of Generations and Plants

17
22
27
28
37
45
46

Walking with Indigenous Stories
in the Canadian Heritage Garden at VanDusen

48

The Medicine Wheel Ceremony and Ohaeng Theory

54

Temporal World Building

59

Hidden Values in Time

63

Epilogue
Bibliography

68
70

Why Time?
Research context and framing

8

Research context and framing

Why Time?
Abstract, quantified time—clock-time—has facilitated
the functioning of a globalised economy in which “time
is money” reducing work to measurable output, while
disrupting and displacing nonmodern temporalities

Anne-Marie Willis,
Design in Crisis, 2020

(Willis, 2020, 74).

I dream about everyday living being favourable to planet Earth
and its various ecosystems, instead of being harmful. I decide
to choose the word dream because the pace, expense, and demands
of contemporary urban living and working conditions can make it
difficult to make ethical and ecological choices or even to see our
individual efforts as having a significant impact. For a number of
years, I have been actively practicing zero-waste living advocacy, but
recently I have increasingly found it difficult to actively participate
in a low-impact lifestyle due to what Laura Giurge refers to as time
poverty, a constant feeling that I have “too many things to do but not
enough time to do them” (Giurge et al., 2020, 2).
Juggling work and study, the pressure to use my time economically,
often impedes me from acting on my values and beliefs to minimize
waste, reuse, or mend items, seek out ethical products, and learn ways
of living locally within seasonal rhythms. My choices around daily
activities and mundane consumption now consciously calculate
convenience, productivity, and efficiency to save time. As a working
graduate student living in Vancouver, I experience a new pace of time,
often catching myself being lost in decisions between old and new
habits. This self-reflection pulls me into an uncomfortable collision
between the efforts of ethical living practices, the demands of school
deadlines, and the capitalistic structures of time of employment.

9

Why Time?

In Designing of Time, Willis emphasizes how time is quantified and
measured as a resource, just like money. She offers a perspective
on how the way we perceive and conceptualize time through
“western, Christian, capitalistic civilizational matrices” plays a role
in the anthropogenic climate crisis we find ourselves in (Willis, 2020,
82). How do these economically measurable perceptions of time
that we are immersed in constrain us from accommodating ethical
participation in everyday life?
Numerous questions follow, inviting me to explore the inconspicuous
space of time further.
· Does immersion within a linear, technologically mediated, anthropocentric, numerically divided, and quantified perception of time, such
as minutes, hours, days, and weeks, blind us from seeing the ways it
shapes our concerns and actions and its ecological and social impacts?
· What values and priorities does our current relationship with time
reinforce or perpetuate?
· How might different understandings and experiences of time allow us
to perceive and act differently in our world?
· Could a different attunement to time, as experienced by other
creatures and cultures, help us conceive more ethical futures not only
for ourselves, but for all beings?
This thesis explores how different perceptions of time shape us in the
hopes that other conceptions and awareness of time might open us up
to other possibilities for more ecological ways of relating to and living
in our world. Time is an essential equation that shapes many of our
day-to-day decisions about what we do and how we do them, but the
ubiquity of the structures of time we are immersed in can act as a kind
of filter, such that we do not always notice their influence. In what
philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg describes as the paradox
of the obvious, that which is most familiar in our lives often becomes

10

Why Time?

almost invisible. As an example, he questions whether fish know that
they are wet, “…I may be wrong about fish, but I suspect that the last
thing they think about is the medium of their existence...” (Feenberg,
2010, 6).
Acknowledging time as a given frame of the world, I seek to bring
this familiar element of life—like water to fish—into a centre of
questioning. The work that follows represents a journey that hopes to
defamiliarize the constructs of time we operate in, but do not always
consciously perceive or acknowledge. Observing time as an essential
element that structures one’s life in large and small ways, I embark
on a journey to explore the complex ways time shapes everyday living
conditions, to see the behavioural patterns different conceptions of
time co-shape and explore the alternate value sets embedded in them.
Through the acts of exploring, tracing, and defamiliarization, this
research attempts to reveal how our values, priorities, and ways of
living are deeply tied to our relationship with time, and what the
implications of that relationship are for enacting more ecologically
favourable ways of living.

Exploring
The sociologist and methodologist Robert Stebbins, states that
exploratory research is about situating oneself purposely in a place,
unsettling and questioning what one knows again and again
(Stebbins, 2001). I put exploration as the primary method of this
research, following curiosity to investigate and contrast different
experiences of time. Through deliberately looking around and
exploring the social experience of time, I allow myself to navigate
and tumble into the malleable space of temporality, seeking out
the hiddens within our relationship with time and their impact
on ecological living.

11

Why Time?

Tracing
Carl DiSalvo, who teaches and writes on design thinking, theory, and
methods, articulates tracing as one of the designerly means to the
construction of publics—the public as an entity that comes into
being through issues relating to our social world (DiSalvo, 2009).
He advocates tracing as a tactic, as it acts to expose, follow, and
record the hidden beliefs, discourse, and movements of an idea
(2009). Defining tracing as the form of designers’ practice “to detail
and communicate, and to make known, the network(s) of materials,
actions, concepts, and values that shape and frame an issue over
time,” he recognizes communication design as the most immediate
field of practice to locate the tactic of tracing (DiSalvo, 2009, 55).
Using tracing as a tool to seek the footprints of time, I mark and
evidence the constructs of temporality that affect our being in the
world and attempt to engage others through discussions of shifting
perspectives of time.

Defamiliarization
In Art as Technique, Victor Shklovsky, a leading figure of Russian
literary criticism, claims that art aims to deliver the sensations of
objects as if they are observed for the first time, not what they are
already known as (Newton, 1997). Following his description of
defamiliarization as the technique which creates new perceptions,
I recognize the power of defamiliarizing in researching time,
a presence so familiar it becomes an unquestioned force in our lives.
Using defamiliarization to research different experiences of time,
I seek to become witness to time’s unseen influence with a fresh
pair of eyes.

Time Explorations
Design practice and outcomes

14

Introduction

The Experience of Exploring Time
The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we
do not see it—hence we cannot say anything significant
about it (Shklovsky via Newton, 1997, 4).

Victor Shklovsky,
Art as Technique, 1917.

How does one track presences and absences, latencies or
anomalies across assemblages that may cohere through
other-than-human rhythms and scales, as is the case
perhaps with disappearing wetlands? Importantly,
how does one decenter modern systems for reckoning
with time (e.g., Gregorian calendars, digital clocks,
historical timelines) as just a few among many ways
that we make, socialize, and write about continuity and
change? (Gan, 2021, 106).

Elaine Gan,
Experimenting with
Ethnography, 2021.

This body of work envelops stories and visuals of human and
other-than-human time perceptions that have become obscured,
hidden, or under-acknowledged in contemporary urban life.
Exploring a mix of immersion in different practices, making to
reflect, visualizing to communicate, questioning, and navigating
the gaps of understanding, I seek to reveal and defamiliarize our
taken-for-granted notions of time. I collect evidence of its’ fluidity
to escape the linear, quantified, modernist, capitalist, and colonialist
perceptions of temporality. Tracing time becomes the wheel of my
experimental thinking to familiarize myself with alternative ways
of everyday living, in search of the barriers and opportunities in
time that might enable more ecologically responsible ways of
living and being.
Hidden in the complex and overlapping layers of time are the values
and desires of people, societies, nations, and the cultures that pursued
them, or had them imposed upon them by others. Peeling apart layers
of time and its multiple touch points, I will explore the traditional
indigenous knowledge of my home country, South Korea, and the

15

Introduction

uncomfortable disturbances of western framed modernity. The act
of exploring time opens deep reflective space on my design practice,
heritage, and responsibility as a citizen of Earth.
In order to open up the possibilities of perceiving time differently,
I defamiliarize the subject, relocate and shift it out of its common
associations. Through actively defamiliarizing time and shining it
under a conscious spotlight, I attempt to better understand the
simplified, automatic, and economically measured interactions with
time that might be keeping us from living more ecologically
value-driven and relational interpretations of time. Time shapes
us, but we also shape time. Time is living and changing. Exploring,
tracing, and defamiliarizing time create curiosity and opportunities to
imagine beyond what is familiar.

Design practice and outcomes

Time Explorations Chapter 1.

Time Journaling
Urban, Semester Time
Backcountry Camping, Break Time

18

Time journaling

Figure 1.
The records of when
and how frequently
I checked the time
each day for one
week.

Figure 2.
The records of my
time perception
each day during the
camping.

19

Time journaling

Urban, Semester Time
Clock time is a local measure of change, neither absolute
nor universal. Nevertheless, clock time is ultimately what
rules our lives: it not only tells us when to rise, work, and
sleep, but, because the body itself is a clock, clock time
governs when we grow old and expire

Dean Buonomano,
Your Brain is a Time
Machine. 2018

(Buonomano, 2018, 15).

When my schedule is filled with commitments of everyday duties
and obligations, arithmetically measured time appears to move fast,
and feels slippery, unable to be grasped no matter how often I check
the time. The mundane behaviour of engaging with clock time is
unconscious, however, I sense the constant urge to know the
numerical report of time to make informed decisions while carrying
out everyday performances. My mind drifts off to ponder this
seemingly senseless act of checking the time. I contemplate ways to
break the habitual impulse of wanting to know the time throughout
the day and attune myself to this repetitive pattern of behaviour.
I decide to write a time journal to source primary information.
Whenever I check the time over seven days, I write down when,
why, and what feelings arise. I cover little corners of the screens
on my electric devices to avoid looking at the time by accident.
I sense moments of liberation on the first day of the time journaling
since it prompts me to look at the clock less often. Not looking at
the time makes me feel like I own more time. After a couple of days,
I notice how challenging it is to avoid checking the time. Wherever I
go, the microwave, my phone, and any other screens alert me to what
time it is. I plan my daily commute perfectly, so as not waste my time
on the street waiting for the bus. When I feel hungry, I check the time
to see if it is an appropriate time to eat. Before I go to bed, I check the
time to make sure I sleep for six to eight hours, which I hear as an

20

Time journaling

appropriate amount of sleep. From the moment I wake up until
I unwind in bed, my entire day is shaped by minutes and hours.
In the middle of the semester cycle, living in an urban apartment,
I cannot escape a linear, quantified structure of time. As I write
down reasons and feelings of why I check the time, the accumulated
notes begin to translate the tendency and urgency to utilize time
productively—the more work I do in a given time, the better
productivity I achieve. I begin recognizing inherent modern
values of convenience, efficiency and productivity ingrained in my
day-to-day relationship with time. There is no space for “subjective
time”—natural, bodily sense of time, my own interpretation
of time(Buonomano, 2018, 15). What clocks objectively translate
in a numerical form appears to be the dominant structure ordering
our day, prioritizing what we can and cannot make time for,
and influencing how we live day to day.
I suddenly remember I used to enjoy cross-stitching growing up. I
pick up needles and threads to stitch the frequency of times I look at
the clocks, sewing them on the fabric to place on a second-hand clock.
I use seven different thread colours to mark each day separately based
on the traditional Korean colour spectrum—오방색, Obangsaek¹. I
begin stitching from the clock's centre with red thread to mark the
first day and blue for the next day. Each stitch aligns with the ordinary
divisions of the clock to function without the numbers, displaying
how many times I check the clocks within each hour. Stitching quietly,
using my fingertips to find the right holes, I lose track of time.

1.
Obangsaek is the colour scheme of white, black, blue, yellow, and red colour that is
commonly used in traditional arts and textile patterns in Korea. Obangsaek combines the
Five Elements and Five Colours theory from China, and each colour holds its own meaning
in Korean culture.

21

Time journaling

Figure 3-5.
The images of the
cross-stitched clock.

22

Time journaling

Backcountry Camping, Break Time
This directly experienced terrain, rippling with cricket
rhythms, and scoured by the tides, is the very realm now
most ravaged by the spreading consequences of our
disregard. Many long-standing and lousy habits have
enabled our callous treatment of surrounding nature,
empowering us to clear-cut, dam up, mine, develop,
poison, or simply destroy so much of what quietly
sustains us (Abram, 2011, 6).

David Abram,
Becoming animal, 2011

I plan a backcountry camping for another time journaling prompt.
I am curious to compare my relationship with time from an urban
setting and contrast it with rhythms informed by natural
surroundings. I follow a similar method as before, but I ditch
the clock time completely this time.
I wake up to the sound of raindrops on our tent. What a luxurious
start to the day, despite minor backaches. It feels weird not knowing
the time. I am still determining how long I have been drinking this
coffee and if I want to know. I do not know when I wake up in the
morning, when I should eat lunch, or how long it will take to drive
back to the nearest town. The tide is coming in and out right in front
of the campsite. Freshly chopped cedar tree for fire smells so fragrant.
I stare at the water, geese, clouds, and other beings sharing time and
space with me. I remember I can use the sun’s path to tell time. The
sun is around the east, so it must be still early in the morning. I fail
once to avoid looking at the time when I check my urgent emails to
schedule meetings for the week I get back. I go for a walk before the
tide returns and collect driftwood for fires. I make sure to prepare
dinner before the sun goes down. I go to bed because the rain starts
falling again. I wake up when the birds sing loudly. Mundane decisions
follow the rhythms and timings of nature.

23

Time journaling

Figure 6-8.
The natural surroundings of
the North Thormanby Island.

24

Time journaling

Dean Buonomano, a neuroscientist who researches how brains tell
time, explains our unique ability to conceptualize time and the
foreseeable future as being essential to survival. Predicting the Sun
and the Moon, seasonal changes, and reading patterns in natural
phenomena was an extremely precious source of information to
sustain living (Buonomano, 2018). To our ancestors, tracking time
is fundamentally calendric. Days of backcountry camping without
having to use clock time, I experience time through the lens of nature,
organizing my new daily routines depending on the most visible ways
of measuring temporality—the ups and downs of the celestial bodies
in the sky and the patterns on the sand that are made by the rising and
falling tides. Slowly embodying the knowledge and experience of the
terrain I am surrounded by, I collect evidence of different passages
in time. I catch myself sensing unfamiliar ways to relate to time,
although looking up at the sky to guess the time of the day feels
foreign and almost silly.
Consciously interacting with time in two different surroundings—the
urban setting with the presence of clock time and the backcountry
environment with the presence of natural cycles of life and ecological
systems—I sense hidden characteristics of time as the fundamental
structure of everyday living. The preoccupation with numerical,
uniform, and comparable time measurement in modern society offers
an agency to live efficiently and productively. Under the belief that
time is like an arrow or scarce like gold, rather than cyclical, the
economic associations of temporality become a baseline relation to
time. It interrupts us from recognizing what an industrial relationship
with time inevitably prioritizes. New questions arise, does this lack
of time-awareness work to keep us away from the joys of wasting
time? And more seriously, are our notions of care for the lives of
other-than-humans and the possibilities for human inhabitable
futures of the planet tied to how we measure and interact with time?

25

Time journaling

Figure 9-12.
The infographics of the Sun’s path
and geological time around the
North Thormanby Island.

Design practice and outcomes

Time Explorations Chapter 2.

Design of Time
and Social Priorities
Agricultural, Korean Time
Industrial, Coordinated Universal Time

28

Design of Time and Social Priorities

Agricultural, Korean Time
Societies that hunt and farm need to know the seasons,
fishermen and navigators need to know the tides. Why
have calendars at all? In order to predict the regular
patterns of nature. In an agricultural society you need
a solar calendar to know when best to sow your crops. In
a society that lives by fishing you need a lunar calendar
to know the tides. Yet it’s impossible to establish a simple
arithmetical relationship between the two that would
bring them into harmony (Eco et al., 1999, 4).

Stephen Jay Gould,
Conversations About the
End of Time, 1999

I try remembering the sweetness of red bean porridge in my mouth
when the night stretches over winter. Korean people believe eating
red bean porridge on winter solstice protects us from evil spirits and
misfortunes. My motherland was a predominantly agricultural society
until the 1960s, and as such, it used the lunisolar calendar for over
1,000 years along with many other Asian countries.
The lunisolar calendar consists of both the Moon phase and the
time of the solar year, which is the Sun’s position in the Earth’s sky.
“Months are lunar, beginning on the day of the new moon and ending
on the day before the next new moon” (Dershowitz & Reingold, 2008,
247). The calendar breaks down the solar year into twenty-four solar
terms, or seasons, and each solar term is a period of approximately
fifteen days corresponding to “15º segments of solar longitude”
(2008, 248). In the lunisolar calendar, each name and meaning
of these twenty-four solar terms are contextualized into seasonal
divisions in ways which convey intimate human interactions through
the changes in natural phenomena to sync agricultural activities.

29

Design of Time and Social Priorities

Figure 13.
The seasonal divisions
in the Korean lunisolar
calendar and the Sun’s
annual circuit.

Figure 14.
The equivalent
Gregorian dates and
meanings of the
seasonal divisions.

30

Design of Time and Social Priorities

The design of the lunisolar calendar functions to remind and
harmonize cyclical patterns in nature with people’s everyday living.
Far away from my homeland, I give myself time and space to
remember and reflect on some of the seasonal divisions, their unique
names, and the relational contexts they marked:

경칩 Gyeong-Chip (the equivalent date is March 5-6th on the
Gregorian calendar) marks the day of the awakening of
hibernating insects. In this third solar term of spring, living
beings awaken from their winter sleep and this date implies
that the weather will steadily become warmer. In Korea, this
season is associated with the awakening of frogs and some used
to believe eating frogs or salamander eggs keeps them healthy
throughout the year.
소만 So-Man (May 21-22nd) is the second solar term of summer,
which interprets that the sun is abundant and everything grows
and fills up the world. Barley sprouts grow, wild plants bloom,
bear fruit, and people are busy preparing rice transplanting.
So-Man is a busy season for both nature and people.
대서 Dae-seo (July 23-24th) means great heat. The rainy season is
over in Korea, and the weather starts to heat up significantly.
An old proverb says, “Goats’ horns melt in Dae-seo.” People visit
nearby mountain valleys and streams to avoid the heat and
relish drinks and seasonal food to stay energetic. Around Dae-seo,
late July and early August remain the peak of summer holiday
seasons in Korea.
처서 Cheo-seo (August 23-24th) means the summer heat stops
and fresh fall comes. As the scorching summer sun softens up
and weeds no longer grow as much, people mow grass in their
rice paddies and ancestors’ graves. A proverb goes, “Mosquitoes’
mouths become crooked after Cheo-seo.” Flies and mosquitoes start
to disappear, and crickets appear one by one due to the coolness
around Cheo-seo.

31

Design of Time and Social Priorities

As Abram reflects, in Becoming Animal: an earthly cosmology, “Our
indigenous ancestors, after all, had to survive and flourish without any
of the technologies upon which we moderns have come to depend”
(Abram, 2011, 43). Their tangled kinship and dependence on the
natural timing of the land and other-than-humans determined their
usage of time and ways of living. I remember more proverbs and
sayings that speak of ecological wisdom to guess the climate
and weather. I envision the time my ancestors spent translating the
complicated relational language of their environment to thrive within
nature, not seeing themseves above or apart from it. They believed
we could communicate with and learn from nature if we knew
how to listen.
If swallows fly low, it rains.
제비가 낮게 날면 비가 온다.

Typhoons occur frequently if magpies build their nests low.
까치가 낮은 곳에 집을 지으면 태풍이 온다.

The weather is nice if spiders spin webs.
거미가 줄을 치면 날씨가 좋다.

When ants move houses, it rains.
개미가 이사하면 비가 온다.

If the leaves fall early, it snows early.
낙엽이 일찍 떨어지면 눈이 일찍 온다.

When spring flowers bloom again in autumn, the cold weather
of the year will come late.
봄꽃이 가을에 다시 피면 그 해는 추위가 늦다.

The lunisolar calendar was originally derived from ancient China
during the Zhou dynasty period and is widely used in East Asian
cultural spheres. Korea uses almost identical names, dates,
and meanings to the Chinese calendar and twenty-four solar terms,

32

Design of Time and Social Priorities

however, a few summer and winter terms are interpreted differently
for the Korean context due to geographic differences. Since the solar
terms are named after the climate in the North China Plain, the
timings of weather patterns implied in the meanings of their names
do not always sync with Korean unique geography and climate.
小暑 Xiǎo shǔ (June 7-8th), for example, refers to slight heat in

Chinese which describes the summer heat that begins around this
seasonal division. However, 소서 So-seo in Korea—directly translated
from the Chinese term—is in the beginning of the monsoon season
due to the moist air from the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean
traveling back and forth around the Korean Peninsula, which forms
differing seasonal rain patterns. Instead of marking the beginning of
the heat, humidity is at its peak, and the hot summer days kick off
once the constant rain eases out, a month after 소서 So-seo. Other
differences in the meanings of the solar terms lie in 小寒 Xiǎo hán
(January 6-7th), which refers to slight cold, and 大寒 Dà hán
(January 20-21st), great cold. In Korea, the equivalent terms,
소한 So-han and 대한 Dae-han, are interpreted in the opposite way.
소한 So-han marks the coldest time of the winter, and 대한 Dae-han
gets relatively warm due to the different weather phenomena caused
by geographical differences between the Korean Peninsula vs North
China. Using the positions of the Sun and Moon to mark cyclical time,
the lunisolar calendar assisted people in understanding the trends
of their local climate, witnessing, and embodying the seasonality
of natural cycles, which allowed them to sustainably secure food
for each year. I reflect on the importance of how lunisolar calendars
were specifically adapted to their unique geographies, climates,
fauna, and flora.
After countless generations of using the lunisolar calendar, in 1896,
Korea adopted the Gregorian calendar. This occurred during the last
years of the Chosun dynasty, the last dynastic kingdom (Dershowitz
& Reingold, 2008), which was characterized by a time of transitions

33

Design of Time and Social Priorities

towards modernized and westernized structural changes from a
Confucianist society facing waves of threats from the foreign powers,
especially the Japanese. This complex period of Korean history saw
Japanese colonisation, the Korean war, and a period of accelerated
capitalist development. Growing up in a post-industrialized South
Korea, I experienced a handful of traditional seasonal customs:
posting calligraphic notes on entrances to wish for a prosperous year
in 입춘 Ip-chun, the beginning of spring; swinging fire cans on my
uncle’s farmlands to get rid of harmful insects during 정월 대보름
Jongwol-daeboreum, the first full moon of the lunisolar year. But
most of the seasonal holidays were reduced to small, relatively
unimportant bits of information on the calendar, printed in a small
letter size, almost invisible. The relational meanings of the seasonal
divisions, embedded living knowledge and expressions of seasons and
timing of the natural environment are all but forgotten or turned into
something fragmented, often reduced consumeristically to a special
food or statutory holiday festival.
In Conversations about the end of time, Stephen Jay Gould—
an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian
of science—explains the reason we have calendars is to predict
regularity in the natural environment, which informs the unique
surroundings of each society to sustain their living (Eco et al., 1999).
The lunisolar calendar was adopted in agrarian societies like Korea,
but in the transition to a modernized and industrialized society, the
Gregorian calendar became the more useful tool. It allowed people to
schedule, organize the labour and production of a society in sync with
a changing world—priorities in production, progress, development,
and prosperity for the future.
I speak about my research to my family, and my dad reminds me that
the seasonal divisions of the lunisolar calendar are still in use in rural
farming areas. I stumble across a report announcing the results of
climate change trend analysis in Korea's past with observation data

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Design of Time and Social Priorities

since 1912 (The Korean Meteorological Administration, 2021).
The report summarizes that summer days are now twenty days longer
and winter days are twenty-two days shorter than a hundred years
ago, resulting in the desynchronization of seasonal divisions of the
lunisolar calendar with the current weather patterns (fig.15-16).
Each year, precipitation increases, however, the number of days with
precipitation decreases due to the changes in climate. With more
extreme and intense rainfalls during summer and fall, winter and
spring seasons experience more frequent droughts.
The new realities of the climate change challenge the predictable
divisions and characteristics of the weather patterns marked on the
lunisolar calendar. I begin to wonder how we should trace, mark,
and name these unpredictable, rapid climate changes as the Earth's
temperature continues to rise. How might we adapt ourselves and our
everyday living to the unseen timings of the natural environment?

35

Design of Time and Social Priorities

Figure 15.
The climate change
altered lunisolar
calendar dates.

Figure 16.
The climate change
altered lunisolar
calendar.

36

Design of Time and Social Priorities

Figure 17.
Speculating the future of
the climate change altered
lunisolar calendar.

37

Design of Time and Social Priorities

Industrial, Coordinated Universal Time
Traditional rhythms began to look indolent and even
primitive. The division and synchronization of labour
became the norm in many manufacturing sites and, after
a century of propaganda, manufacturers’ time came to
seem natural (Gay, 2003, 110).

Hanna Gay,
Clock Synchrony,
Time Distribution and
Electrical Timekeeping
in Britain 1880-1925,
2003

I often look up what time and day it is in Korea and a few other places
in the world where my friends and family live. Finding the overlapping
window of time to catch up with my loved ones is a mission when the
time difference adds up to seventeen hours. Reminding myself of the
mathematic grid design of time frequently—an artificial social
agreement—sparks a curiosity. When did we unify time worldwide,
why, and how did it happen?
In October 1884, the Government of the United States held the
International Meridian Conference in Washington. European nations
desired a unified way of recognizing time in order to accommodate
increasing steamship, railway, and telegraph activity. To facilitate
the process, America invited all nations with which it had diplomatic
relations, to come together, “for the purpose of fixing upon a meridian
proper to be employed as a common zero of longitude and standard
of time-reckoning throughout the globe” (Various, 2006).² From this
conference, the Royal Observatory of Greenwich—located on the
outskirts of London—became the prime meridian for longitude and
the base to measure standard clock time.

2.
This quote is inserted from The Project Gutenberg EBook of International Conference Held
at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day.

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Design of Time and Social Priorities

Beginning the roughly seventy-years-long pursuit of establishing
a coordinated global demarking of time, assisted the expansion of
globalization in the second half of the nineteenth century, creating
“markets for goods, capital, and labor; migration, imperialism, and
colonialism; and internationalist movements reaching beyond the
nation-state” (Ogle, 2013, 1380).³ This promise of time among
imperial and colonial countries of the North Atlantic world, and their
borderless capital flows, slowly erased many local ways of recognizing
time across the globe.
The International Date Line determines whether countries along
180 degrees away from the meridian would be twelve hours ahead
or behind of Greenwich Mean Time. However, this date line is not so
straight. It is made of concavities and convexities accommodating the
local circumstances, such as the Bering Strait between the U.S. and
Russia, and lumps of Pacific islands. It has been changing over time,
based on the influence of trade relations and competing economic
goals of powerful global forces. Ariel describes this line is an arbitrary
product of “the feverish imaginations and whims of politicians and
mandarins, not caring for the rest of the world” (Ariel & Berger,
2006, 142). Tracing the unknown histories to grapple with how time
functions the way it is, the values and priorities of the world reveal
themselves. The purpose of time unification represents a preference
and arrangement of the world—the pursuit of wealth, material
abundance, growth, progress, and power. The engineering of unified
timekeeping was crucial for the expansion of the economy, thus
preferred by the people who held power to make decisions on
a global scale, represent their nations and colonies, consult,
and negotiate policies.
3.
Vanessa Ogle is a historian and an assocdiate professor at UC Berkeley who researches
the history of Western Europe in the context of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism,
and the world economy in its interactions with the broader world. In The American
Historical Journal, Ogle describes the multitude of social times and socio-political
circumstances in India and Lebanon when their local times started to fuse with
the introduction of Greenwich Mean Time.

39

Design of Time and Social Priorities

Figure 18.
Sketching the International Date
Line on the map.

Geoscience professor Marcia Bjornerud shares the geological
perspective of time in her book Timefulness. Bjornerud uses the
term “time-literate society” to express our confined relation to time in
comparison to the intergenerational timescales in geology (Bjornerud,
2020, 20). The author expresses that the inability to comprehend our
impacts on multigenerational scales leads to the increasing planetary
crisis—futuring steeply risen sea level and extremely altered weather
patterns. Referring to the Anthropocene, an unprecedented epoch in
the geologic timescale, she addresses that we have reached a threshold
where there are more man-made environmental changes than natural
procedures of geologic and biological processes.
The promise behind the calculating, marking, and coordinating time
into a universal cohesive system represents the values of the era, the
priorities of power, national interests, and flows of capital. Suppose
we aim to prefer ecological health instead of economic success, the
abundance of life instead of material prosperity, and empathy for all

40

Design of Time and Social Priorities

beings instead of willful disregard of our interdependencies in a finite
system. How might we measure and relate to time to include these
other more holistic priorities and essential relations? More
uncomfortable questions arise without knowing how to answer.
I reach for threads and needles again.

Figure 19-20.
Stitching the time map:
The meridian line (top), the time
differences (bottom).

41

Design of Time and Social Priorities

Figure 21.
Stitching the time map.

I stitch a zig-zag line along the prime meridian using a reprint of
Stanford’s General Map of The World from 1920. More than a century
later, this arbitrary line is still present on our maps today. From the
centre of the UK, we relate, calculate our time and space to different
places worldwide (fig.22); Avoiding taking the natural, direct route
across the Pacific Ocean, the time difference is seventeen hours
between Korea and Vancouver (fig.23), and nineteen hours between
Melbourne and Vancouver, with the calculation of the international
date line. I pick up a red thread and materialize more than twelve
hours time difference from my location, all the way to Korea and
Australia; blue thread for eight hours; and green thread for less than
three hours. These anthropocentric, rational, calculative static lines
make the distance between myself, and my friends and family feel
further than it is.

42

Design of Time and Social Priorities

Figure 22.
The time differences between
London and the countries’
major cities that participated in
the 1884 International Meridian
Conference.

43

Design of Time and Social Priorities

Figure 23.
The time differences between
Korea and the countries’ major
cities that participated in the
1884 International Meridian
Conference.

Design practice and outcomes

Time Explorations Chapter 3.

Time Traveling through
Memories and Knowledge
The Breath of Generations and Plants
Walking with Indigenous Stories
in the Canadian Heritage Garden at VanDusen

The Medicine Wheel Ceremony and Ohaeng Theory

46

Time Traveling through Memories and Knowledge

The Breath of Generations and Plants
Our ancestors gave us membership into nations and
traditions; location both remembers and “re-members”
us to those things (Kovach, 2021, 111).

Margaret Kovach,
Indigenous Methodologies,
2021

My grandmother was born in 1923, seventy years before I was born.
I imagine what I could ask her if she was still here. I regret the
chances I missed to ask about her life experience directly, the stories
which can only be obtained through her time of being alive. Reflecting
on the traditions and rituals that come from ancestral knowledge,
I realize their lived experience and perspectives of the world
overcome our individually limited time on earth. Through my parents,
the knowledge my grandmother has carried intimately in her body
and mind, passed down and becomes part of me, blurring the lines
between our gaps of time.
Exploring plural concepts of time and its fluidity, I enter the space of
ancestral time through living and breathing memories of my heritage.
I grew up eating fresh mountain herbs, mushrooms, and roots of
native plants my dad foraged. His place-based knowledge—literacy
of edible, medicinal plants in each season—fed my flesh and bones,
letting me absorb the wind, rain, soil, and terrain of the environment
that is no longer visible in the city. I do not hold such knowledge, my
dad has accumulated this wisdom through a lifetime of observations
and interactions with the mountains. My thoughts linger around this
unavoidable amnesia as each generation passes to the next. I become
curious about the surroundings my family lived in during the 60s
and 70s in a rural mountain town in South Korea, compared to my
contemporary urban living conditions. I urge my dad to tell me about
the everyday living environment of his early life without restaurants,
grocery stores, and roads made of asphalt and concrete.

47

Time Traveling through Memories and Knowledge

1. Do you have any specific memories from everyday living
in the mountains and farm fields?
2. Where does your plant knowledge come from?
3. What plants do you still remember how to distinguish?
4. How long would a beginner like me take to learn your
foraging knowledge?
5. After you moved out of the mountain town and started
working in the city, did you still visit the mountains to forage?
6. What were the main seasonal activities you had to do each year?
Hearing my dad’s responses over the phone, vibrating with nostalgic
stories carrying laughter, gratitude, and sometimes heartbreak, his
memories make time travel possible. The social context of my parents’
generation is that of growing up shortly after the Korean War in the
late 60s and 70s. During this time, the South Korean government
was taking “many shortcuts to achieve economic success,” pursuing
compressed capitalist development in an unprecedented speed (Lim,
2015, 9).
Witnessing the forests, farm fields, mountain valleys, and other-thanhumans that are weaved through my dad’s memories—in contrast to
the remarkable levels of industrialization happening in the cities—I
reflect on my modern efforts to participate in ecological ways of
living as a city dweller. Unlike my dad, who had no other choice
but spending time learning how to identify edible, medicinal plants
to make a living, I negotiate how much discomfort I am willing to
experience. To carry out environmental responsibility on an everyday
level, I voluntarily compromise speed, comfort, convenience, and
efficiency, yet I am detached from the knowledge and skills to live
fully in harmony with nature. The traditional knowledge to make
clothes to wear, food to eat, and artifacts to use daily is replaced by

48

Time Traveling through Memories and Knowledge

modern society’s industrialized products and services, conveniently
helping me save time. We often have very little tangible connection
to most of the goods we consume, the origins of their materiality,
the labour of those who made them, even where they will go when
they are no longer useful to us.

Me

Dad

Dependency
on nature

Indirectly dependent
(Mental and physical
well-being)

Directly dependent
(Sustaining livelihood)

Values in nature

Ethics and aesthetics

Utility

Contact of nature

Living separated

Living with
Figure 24.
A table to compare the
differences between me
and my dad’s relationships with nature.

Walking with Indigenous Stories
in the Canadian Heritage Garden at VanDusen
That indigenous people are aware of a large variety of
uses of local biodiversity including medicinal uses which
have been incorporated in the modern pharmacopoeia is
well known, as is their knowledge of habitat preference,
life history, and behavior relevant to efficient foraging
for resources. Such knowledge is explicit and socially
transmitted from one individual to another within and
across generations in the same manner as scientific
knowledge (Gadgil et al., 1993, 151).

Madhav Gadgil,
Indigenous Knowledge
for Biodiversity
Conservation, 1993

49

Time Traveling through Memories and Knowledge

I worry about what knowledge I could pass on to my unborn children
and a future where they only experience urbanized, disrupted,
and displaced terrains by our modern life-sustaining activities.
I participate in the guided Natural Heritage Walk at VanDusen botanical
garden, one of the few places in the city that could take my senses
away from the urban landscape.

Figure 25.
The Natural Heritage Guided Walk
by indigenous coordinator,
Geronimo Alec at VanDusen
Botanical Garden (top left).

Figure 26-27.
The photos of Salal (top left),
and the tree seeds at VanDusen
(bottom).

50

Time Traveling through Memories and Knowledge

The indigenous coordinator at VanDusen, Geronimo Alec, guides us
through the paths of the Canadian heritage garden and tells us
the tales of the medicinal plants and the first nations’ people. Their
entangled stories encourage me to walk gently, mindful of the
surroundings of native species that are endangered which used to
fundamentally support generations to survive. I quietly acknowledge
the plants’ essential presence in Coast Salish culture and witness a
mutualistic, cooperative stories between humans and nature—
humans satisfying everyday needs based on what nature offers.
Modernity has bestowed numerous social and technological advances
that brought much of the world out of burdensome and labourintensive lives (Wood, 2003). With increasing sophistication
also came increasing complexity of manufacturing processes and
specialization of expertise and labour, such that production systems
are highly differentiated and spread across the globe (Feenberg,
2010). Manufactured goods are largely made somewhere far,
remote from the context of daily surroundings. Thus, modern
living depends on the value of an individuals’ time to afford goods
and services—produced by someone else’s time and labour—shipped
and flown across the globe. The global scale of the consumption-based
living environment pushes us further from being connected
to the land, people, and other beings.
Gideon Kossoff, who teaches and conducts the research in Transition
Design and Ecoliteracy, explains the philosophy of holism and the
reconstitution of everyday life to discuss a framework for a
sustainable society (Kossoff, 2015). He points out that losing control
of place-based self-sufficiency of communities, as he describes as
“the decline of the Domains,” by the globalized marketplace causes
the unsustainability of everyday life (2015, 35). Kossoff argues that
we need to understand the system (whole) and everyday community
(part) as a reciprocal structure rather than hierarchical anatomy
of wholes come before parts. He argues everyday life becomes

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Time Traveling through Memories and Knowledge

sustainable when communities’ needs are satisfied by diverse,
autonomous, emergent, and interrelated networks of everyday
life domains.
Aligning with Kossoff’s idea, Adrienne Maree Brown in Emergent
Strategy introduces mutualism as part of the framework of emergence⁴
(Brown, 2017). She shares the idea that natural selection requires
mutual relationship not individual, and species sustain only if they
cooperate within their community. Considering the notion of holistic
health of a species that is mirrored in the health of an individual,
I ponder upon this concept of interconnectedness, the disappearing
relationship in our mundane living. As Kossoff says, “The mutual
participation that previously enabled people, artifacts, and nature–the
parts of everyday life–to belong together is now diminished” (Kossoff,
2015, 32). As Brown points out, most of us are socialized for
independence—through the belief of “constant growth, violent
competition, and critical mass” (Brown, 2017, 17). Our fragmented
independent perception of time confesses the lack of interdependence
and mutualism in understanding and seeing the whole we collectively
make up—acting blindly without considering future ancestors of the
human and otherwise.
Dependent on ‘natural rhythms’ oriented to a variety of tasks related
to an agricultural economy, these older notations were replaced by a new
manufacturers’ time, a precious commodity measured in monetary terms
(Gay, 2003, 109).

I think of the wisdom imparted from prominent indigenous writer and
storyteller, Thomas King, through the underlying message of his 2003
Massey Lectures, that “the truth about stories is that that’s all we are”
(King, 2003, 5). King reminds us that we need to be mindful of the
4.
Throughout her book Emergence Strategy, Brown refers to Nick Obolenksy’s definition
of emergence: “Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions” (Brown, 2017, 15).

52

Time Traveling through Memories and Knowledge

narratives we are told, and those we tell others, about the world. As an
example, the author shares two creation stories, one Christian and one
Indigenous, contrasting the different world views, relationships, and
values inherent in each. In the Christian story of Genesis, creation is
an individual act of a singular supreme deity creating a perfect world
governed by rules and hierarchies, “God, man, animals, plants.” In the
Indigenous creation story of Charm, the Skywoman, the creation
of the world is a shared activity between humans and animals, who
negotiate the shape of the world and work to must maintain balance
and harmony (2003, 28). In the closing of the lecture, King asks would
we live differently if we only had heard this story as our core story,
while reminding us… we have heard it now.
I oscillate between the stories of my dad and the Coast Salish people,
living and breathing memories that sustained generations through
the collective place-based knowledge of nutritive and healing plants.
Tracing ancestral time—learning about food plants of the coastal
first peoples and listening to my dad’s childhood memories—I travel
across time and find a living environment which fosters an attentive
partnership with nature. From the stories and knowledge of my dad
and the indigenous coordinator at VanDusen, I experience concepts
of time that capture a forgotten cooperation with nature, the
relational and intertwined reciprocal interactions of plants and
people. I question how to interpret time and everyday living
differently to revive a mutual relationship with nature. I repeat
the stories to myself to remember the times when nature was
feared, worshiped, and respected sacredly.

53

Time Traveling through Memories and Knowledge

Figure 28.
The harvest timing of
important edible and
medicinal plants of the
Coast Salish People.

Figure 29.
The harvest timing of
edible and medicinal
plants my dad forages
around Jeolla province
in South Korea.

54

Time Traveling through Memories and Knowledge

The Medicine Wheel Ceremony and Ohaeng Theory
[To the Blackfoot peoples] chronological order is not as
important as the story contained within the [pictographs
of winter counts] and, unlike the linear European
method of recording history, Blackfoot ‘‘time was
recorded in a circle” (p.2) (Bickford & Petrucka, 2016, 412).

Deanna Bickford &
Pammla Petrucka,
Re-Visioning the Winter
Count, 2016

Indigenous people have been using medicine wheel ceremonies for
over 5,000 years to bring balanced health and healing. I have been
invited to participate on the longest day of the year, the summer
solstice. I situate myself on the ground along the circle of the
medicine wheel. The wheel is divided into four cardinal directions,
and each compass direction holds lessons and spiritual meanings,
such as the seasons, other-than-humans, stages of the human lifetime,
and dimensions of one’s health.
The ceremony⁵ begins with singing and drumming after the smoke
of burning sage cleansed the bodies and minds of the ceremony
participants. The sounds of the drums and the smell of the sage transform the present time to ancient moments. Elder Phil L’Hirondelle,
who leads the ceremony, invites us to close our eyes and think for all
the creatures, two-legged, four-legged, plants, and rocks that surround
us. With my eyes shut, I prepare my senses to recognize all the earthly
beings that often sit in the background of my consciousness. My body
attunes to touch the air, smell the trees, hear ravens cry above our
heads, and time pauses and travels backwards.

5.
The medicine wheel ceremony I participated was at VanDusen botanical garden. Elder
Phil L’Hirondelle led the ceremony based on the teachings from Bernice Falling Leaves.
https://www.vandusengarden.org/interview-medicine-wheel-ceremony

55

Time Traveling through Memories and Knowledge

Figure 30-31.
The images taken at the medicine
wheel ceremony at VanDusen.

Sitting along the rim of the circle, I listen to the rich interpretations
of the world evidencing the cyclical patterns of our mutual experience
as humans on the planet Earth. Each quadrant of the wheel represents
the following meanings: 1) East, West, North, and South; 2) spring,
summer, fall, and winter seasons of nature; 3) beginning (0-25),
adolescence (25-50), adulthood (50-75), elderhood (75-100)
of human life stages; and 4) the physical, mental, emotional, and
spiritual aspects of one’s health. I gaze at the colourful flags that
mark the four quadrants, and realize the colours are almost identical
to 오방색 Obangsaek, the five traditional Korean colour schemes.

56

Time Traveling through Memories and Knowledge

Figure 32.
The graphics of the
medicine wheel.

Figure 33.
The graphics of
Yin and Yang, and the
Five Elements theory.

57

Time Traveling through Memories and Knowledge

The colour spectrum Obangsaek means the colours of five directions
in Korean and is strongly influenced by the concepts of Yin-Yang and
the Five Elements from China as “a living philosophy for Koreans
since ancient times” (Martinson & Delong, 2012, 218). Based on
a belief that two forces of Yin and Yang created the world, Korean
people believed these forces generated 오행 Ohaeng, the five elements
of earth, water, metal, fire, and wood; Each of the elements is assigned
to the 오방 Obang (the five directions) representing centre (yellow),
north (black), west (white), south (red), and east (blue) (Koehler,
2015). Ohaeng theory and Obang colours are still present in
traditional artifacts—Hanbok (Korean clothing), paintings, and
cuisine—implying to wish for good fortune and long healthy life.
As the graphics (fig.32-33) describe in detail, the symbolic meanings
in both belief frameworks and cultural constructs convey similar
meanings, perspectives, and values, connecting us with the outer
surroundings towards the harmonious circularity. Four seasons
of nature portray the stages of human life, as one of the elders in the
ceremony referred to the metaphoric interpretation that what you will
harvest by the adulthood and elderhood rely on what you planted and
grew during the early stages of your life. The medicine wheel not
only asks people to connect with the past, present, and future of
themselves and others, but to pay attention to the connectivity of the
body, mind, emotion, and spirit. The wheel emphasizes the holistic
health of individuals in relation to other beings, teaching the value
of harmony in cycles of living that are erased in the quantified, linear
measurement of our modern perception of time—broken into the
units of time that we forget to perceive as part of our life.
Much of the medicine wheel ceremony is spent listening to the
intimate prayers of each participant, sitting alongside others with
whom they had just met along the circle of the wheel. We take turns
standing in each quadrant of the four directions, near the centre of
the circle, and share our ancestral roots and lived stories of hope and

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Time Traveling through Memories and Knowledge

despair. We infuse our prayers and wishes into the stone we were
asked to bring prior to the ceremony, leaving it on the ground at the
centre of the wheel with mother earth. The medicine ceremony ends,
standing closely with each other near the flag representing each of our
age groups. I receive the gifts of connectedness, a full circle of life,
in the presence of others with whom I shared this moment,
but may never encounter again.

Temporal World Building
Reflection

60

Reflection

Temporal World Building
How are we to manage our destiny as temporal beings?
In what ways have human beings set about trying
to tame time, to tame this dragon that is devouring
them little by little? And how does language reflect
humanity’s ambiguous relationship with time? Is it true
that for certain civilizations time doesn’t exist? What
is the significance, in Eastern cultures, of the notion
of circular time? To what extent are these radically
different conceptions of reality actually accessible to us?

Umberto Eco,
Conversations about the
end of time, 1999

(Eco et al., 1999, 96).

How are we using our time? And what does it tell us about ourselves
and the world we live in? I engage in exploratory and performative
research to illuminate the underlying structure of how we treat time
as a collective in the present day. Embodying a malleable attitude to
time, this thesis depicts the gap between our held framework of the
progressive and developmental relationship with time and how we
might act differently with time to bring forth values underrepresented
in linear time. Each day, individuals unwittingly perform and
conform to the modern world’s criteria of handling time efficiently,
productively, and often in relation to a cost-benefit analysis. The
dominant experience of time in developed economies is economically
measured and oriented around work and productivity, which
constrains the possibilities for more relational ecological concerns
and the ways in which all beings and their habitats are considered.
In my work, I seek to develop an awareness and literacy of time by
observing the ways in which we interpret, utilize, and perceive time.
The experiential research evidences complex entanglements between
divergent temporalities and our ways of being.
This journey of researching time began with a question, how diverse
understandings and experiences of time might support and cultivate
ecologically responsible everyday living practices. Instead, following

61

Reflection

the traces of time offers us a literacy to interpret hidden frames of the
world: the underlying constructs and interconnected relationships of
everyday living and the world’s systems. Tracing time, remembering
the traditional and cultural knowledge of Korea and indigenous
worldviews open our eyes to recognize that different ways of
understanding and living in the world are still present around us.
These stories and relations we find from different measuring and
reckoning of time are not included in an economically measured,
simplified, and automatic perception of time. Various calendar
systems that were developed to mark patterns of tides, natural
rhythms of other-than-humans, and the agricultural timing of
seasons now divide the cycles of seasons into linearly repeating
weekdays and weekends. Through standardized and accurate
mechanical timekeeping technologies, hours and minutes become
a unified roster of our quotidian schedules and monetary returns.
The dominant frames of the world—individualistic, anthropocentric,
capitalist, industrial, and other contemporary values—are melted
and invisibly glued into our daily perceptions of time.
In the 2020 Kreisel Lecture, a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg
scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson introduces Anishnaabe
life as “a persistent world building process,” the everyday practices
of indigenous living—sharing knowledge, building moral and
philosophical understandings, and making processes for dealing with
issues—perform the values and beliefs in “continual, reciprocal, and
reflective” relationship with the land (Simpson, 2020). Regarding
living as a performative act of world building, the literacy of time
opens discussions about how we must use our time to re-establish
and redevelop skills and practices for enacting time that brings other
possibilities for relational care forward.
Leanne Simpson’s stories of her Anishnaabe world invite us to
perceive living as a creative act, that the world is made of what we
decide to create everyday. Our intimate relations with the world

62

Reflection

generate the “algorithm for living, theory and praxis” that are tangled
and answering to one another, spreading inseparable, intangible
connections (2020). Pondering how to design and mold the social
space of time to practice ecologically responsible living, the inquiry
of time confesses the values and priorities of the world that frames
of time are reflected upon. I recognize how we live and use our given
time on Earth is malleable and moldable and can build something
radically different.
Confronting the invisible influence of time that drives people
and societies steadily towards faster, more convenient, efficient,
and productive ways of living, uncovers how values shape the
world and how the world evolves through the accumulated values
we often blindly iterate and unconsciously perpetuate. Different
understandings and considerations of time mirror the modern world’s
priorities, meanings, values, and driving forces. To transition towards
ecologically considerate living in which we could practice relational
care for all beings and our shared habitat, we need to perceive how we
live everyday as a part of world building. Stretching far and beyond
what we know about the world, we need to seek what we are blind to
and what is hidden from us. Tirelessly wrestling and juggling between
competing values of the world that we encounter and participate in,
questioning what we know and what we do not know, can bring forth
different meanings and values of everyday life.

Hidden Values in Time
Research outcome and future directions

64

Research outcome and future directions

Hidden Values in Time
Confronting the scale of unsustainability in our material culture
can be overwhelming for designers and citizens alike. Given the
overwhelming complexity of our globalized economic systems of
distribution and manufacture of goods, services, and technology,
it is difficult to know what cultural shifts are needed to foster
systemic level changes. One of the key barriers that is investigated
in this thesis is our relationship with time, in particular, modernism’s
linear progressive model of time that designers are most familiar
with and its emphasis on the future.
I wanted to know how time structures us and the hidden values
embedded in our perceptions of time that strain us to perpetuate the
systemic scale of unsustainability in everyday living. In this work, I
have explored and traced different patterns of time to defamiliarize
and question them in hopes of developing an active awareness and
understanding of how different temporal structures open or limit our
ways of being. Identifying patterns of time and the values they are tied
to are difficult to notice and connect with our attitudes to living when
time continues to exist in a passive and automatic conceptual space.
We are often too immersed in their flows to be consciously aware
of and experience them. Yet, recognizing and reflecting on time’s
influence on our behaviours, values, and priorities (even if they are
not in the foreground of our perceptions) is critical to interrogate the
values they support and ignore.
The implications of not understanding how time structures us run
the risk of reinforcing what Dilnot and Fry refer to as defuturing
activities—ways of being that passively perpetuate the ecologically
destructive behaviours of using the world around us in the name of
economy, growth and progress (Fry et al., 2015). These aspirations of
modernity are deeply tied to a model of linear time and a focus on the
future as a site of human and technological improvement (Fry, 2020).

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Research outcome and future directions

However, they are not always good at accounting for the cyclical
patterns of other-than-human renewing rhythms of life within
the finite ecosystems of Earth and its beings occupy.
A literacy of time gives us fresh eyes to perceive that the world is
not fixed in one place. It creates open practices and discourse about
the world, imagining what could be different in the fundamental,
taken-for-granted scale of everyday living to imagine different
ecological futures. An awareness of different ways of living and being
with time broadens the scope of our concerns in building the world
as flourishing habitats which might sustain and nurture current and
future generations of humans and other-than-humans. Everyday life
needs more vigorous and imaginative reinterpretations of time to
welcome ecological world building.
Interacting with multiple notions of time that value responsibility and
empathy for all beings, the research has sought to develop a literacy of
our changing relationality to time that is never complete or finished.
This engagement with research to try out and perform different ways
of being opens new spaces of consideration in the practice of design
and opens even more questions for how we take them forward. Being
conscious of the values and priorities we unknowingly replicate,
persistent questioning, observing, imagining, and being naively
curious in researching temporality, opens up the practice of design
to engage with new possibilities and experiments within old ideas or
practices around time (Jungnickel, 2020). Questioning the ideas of
modernity and progress that prefigure our work and how the world
asks us to allocate our time, I obtain the space to contemplate and
transform my way of being in practicing design.
To create a cultural shift in which ecological responsibility holds
serious meaning—instead of perpetuating the extractive,
developmental, instrumental prescription of natural resources—,
we must confront the gap holding design between where we are and

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Research outcome and future directions

where we want to be. In different cultures, past and present, time
has meant something radically different than how we live it today in
modern societies. We need to experiment with our interpretation and
application of time to have possibilities to change again. Consciously
reflecting on our ways of interacting with the world—the research
of time lets the unfamiliar questions guide us to where changes
need to occur in ourselves and the world we live in to design
ecological futures.

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Epilogue

Instead of drawing a closed circle, this thesis followed a series of
curiosity driven questions connected like spirals, expanding and
shrinking in radius without each end ever quite meeting up. The arc
of the journey started and ended with a reflection upon my creative
practice as it collided between modern ways of living and the finite
nature of the environment.
Leaving behind a space of consumerist dominance, I attempted
to expand the horizons of my design practice beyond the polished,
well-curated, physical production of commercial output, utilizing my
skills and knowledge to explore more intangible questions about time
and how it shapes us. Sometimes feeling lost, sitting uncomfortably
in this ambiguous space opened up many unconsidered possibilities
for what and how I might continue to exist in design. Through
these messy processes of making and reflecting on time, difficult
questions arose, many of which I could not tackle in the length
of a master’s degree.

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Epilogue

In a world where ecological responsibility is not yet systemically
reciprocated, design practice can perpetuate extractive behaviours
without considering reciprocity, sufficiency, and balance, let alone
regeneration. How might we design and embed ecological values
in the structures and systems of our everyday lives? Broadening the
scope and application of our well-honed design methods, tactics, and
skills towards ecological world building requires much more rigorous
questioning and imagination as to what design can and cannot do
and what can and cannot be designed.
After exploring a few of the many tangled stories of how more
ecologically oriented relationships with time can restructure our
priorities, concerns, and ways of life, the difficult questions of how
this work moves forward from here are unclear. In many ways,
I am only now at the start of my journey.

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EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN
© Yejin Eun, 2023