1.4 Clock Card Machine

The clock card machine was a time and attendance system used by businesses to keep track of employee work hours. The employee would insert their time card into the slot, and the machine would print the date and time on the card. This was then handed over to the employer who would calculate the salary owed to the employee. This system is regarded as rather oppressive and alienating. It is associated with the factory workplace where each person works long hours doing repetitive tasks.

The idea here is to appropriate the clock card machine into a self-imposed time-based working structure. This has the purpose of limiting the amount of time spent in front of a laptop and increasing efficacy and health while doing intense laptop work.

A Systematic Way of Approaching Work Hours

The system is divided into two activities: laptop work and mediation. Each activity has a time limit, 45 minutes of work and 15 minutes of meditation which are repeated from 3 to 4 times, making it 3 or 4 hours in total. By relying on the system to signal the start and end of a work session the user can be hyper-focused and absorbed in what they are doing without thinking about whether it is time to stop or take a break.

The computer program would involve a timer that is set to 45 minutes and is activated by a gesture detected through a Leap Motion. Once the 45 minutes have passed, the computer program should disable the screen and/or trigger a sound, and the user activates the 15 minute period again by a set gesture. The sound and the gesture is up to the user—whatever the user would find interesting to hear as a signal to change activity and which ever gesture would be interesting to do to activate the change of time period. The drill is illustrated in the image below.