Day in, day out, most people work to meet somebody else’s schedules and deadlines, based on precise and objective synchronization technologies. In this speculative design project Time Benders, Final Year undergraduate student Qiu Guo (supervised by Thomas Fischer) asks: If watches and clocks are shackles that constrain our movement through time, can designed objects be imagined that may release us from these constraints?
In response to this question, Qiu Guo proposes a family of products enabling regular people to take control of their personal time by manipulating the clocks of those in charge of collective time. Technically speaking, the four Time Benders perform (wo)man-in-the-middle attacks on key synchronization technologies: the network time protocol (NTP), radio time signals, AC mains frequency synchronization and quartz oscillators.
