What would the hourglass look like if it was invented in 2023?
Sand Sachets Included
In this speculative project with Jakob Glasner, we assume the role of the commercial designer and develop an updated hourglass to fit the market of today.
Like the vast majority of everyday products, it is not ‘built to last’ but rather ‘built to fail’. The hourglass is open on the top and bottom, relying on disposable sand and leaving a mess behind every time it is used. It forces the customer to buy refills, which in turn makes more profit for the ‘timeless’ company. Green-washing strategies are used to align with the fashion of sustainability and distract the user from the faulty design.
The Timeless Kit
The Hourglass comes in a recycled cardboard tube, embossed with the ’Timeless’ logo. The sand refills are a mixture of recycled and natural, with different colours to individualise the user experience. Sand is sourced from all around the world, ranging from the scenic beach of Anse Source D’Argent in Seychelles to the polluted Baotou lake in Mongolia. The sand from the microplastic ridden Juhu Beach in India offers a multicolour time measuring experience, which is presented to the consumer as ‘recycling’.
The use of sands from sites of beauty, as well as reusing sands that have been coloured by some man-made disaster, aims to highlight the cannibalistic nature of design under the influence of capitalism; which could be avoided by swapping the economics of profit for the economics of empathy.
Production Process for the Timeless Prototype