It’s amazing how two designers can take one concept and come up with two completely opposite ideas for its realization. Take the clock, for example. It’s been reinvented over and over, but usually with the same basic features: a face (digital or analog) and numbers that tell you what time it is. But these two clock concepts do away with convention and create something entirely different.
The Shadow of Time concept from designer Ji Young Shon promotes a laid-back approach to time-keeping. It has no hands and no numbers; rather, it uses beams of light projected onto the wall to give you an approximate time. There’s no harsh clicking, no irritating precision – just gentle light that gets brighter as the day goes on and dimmer when night approaches. You’ll always know approximately what time it is, but there are no exact measurements.
If that approach is a little too relaxed for you, though, there’s always the Mintpass Progress Bar clock. It tells you precisely how much of your day you’ve already wasted with an ever-progressing status bar. You can attach handy little flags to the top of the display to indicate where you have appointments or meetings, and when the progress bar reaches those flags it will emit an alarm – up to 24 every day. We can see this being a big hit with anal-retentive schedulers everywhere.