Abstract
Calendars increasingly play a fundamental role in establishing our everyday rhythms, shaping our consciousness of temporality. But these tools are not neutral. They codify values and behaviour while obscuring the politics of time embedded in their representation. After all, how we represent time affects how we conceptualize time. Calendar Collective is a design-led research investigation that challenges the normative understanding of time as linear, objective and neutral. In this investigation, I use calendar as a subversive tool to dismantle current hegemonic time structures and rebuild plural structures. As a designer from a previously colonized country, I employ calendar as a decolonization tool to render time - one of the most invisible epistemologies in futures work - visible. Using a combination of participatory design workshops, counterfactual history techniques, and personal cultural experiences, I unfold a fictitious archive of alternate calendars (real and imagined) traced through voicemails. The voicemails are a reminder that complex socio-cultural systems based on alternate temporal thought have always existed and still do.
Keywords
speculative design; futures; calendars; time
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2021.0026
Citation
Tupkary, K.(2021) Calendar Collective, in Leitão, R.M., Men, I., Noel, L-A., Lima, J., Meninato, T. (eds.), Pivot 2021: Dismantling/Reassembling, 22-23 July, Toronto, Canada. https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2021.0026
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Calendar Collective
Calendars increasingly play a fundamental role in establishing our everyday rhythms, shaping our consciousness of temporality. But these tools are not neutral. They codify values and behaviour while obscuring the politics of time embedded in their representation. After all, how we represent time affects how we conceptualize time. Calendar Collective is a design-led research investigation that challenges the normative understanding of time as linear, objective and neutral. In this investigation, I use calendar as a subversive tool to dismantle current hegemonic time structures and rebuild plural structures. As a designer from a previously colonized country, I employ calendar as a decolonization tool to render time - one of the most invisible epistemologies in futures work - visible. Using a combination of participatory design workshops, counterfactual history techniques, and personal cultural experiences, I unfold a fictitious archive of alternate calendars (real and imagined) traced through voicemails. The voicemails are a reminder that complex socio-cultural systems based on alternate temporal thought have always existed and still do.