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Tupkary, Kalyani "Calendar Collective." MFA Design and Technology
, The New School, 2020
Keywords/Fields of Study : Speculative design, Critical Design, Time, Calendars
Abstract: 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 further use the 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 developed a fictitious archive of alternate calendars (real and imagined) traced through voicemails.
The archive is in the form of an audiovisual essay. The “essay” consists of nine alternate calendars and accompanying voicemails that were used as the archive's research material. The essay briefly explains the impetus for forming the collective and expounds the theoretical framework, thinking tools (timescapes, polarity maps, tactile tools), and visual techniques employed to develop the calendars.
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 focuses on the 'aesthetics of unreal time' by mutating the visual design of the calendars, distorting expectations and creating calendars that live between possible and impossible. Rather than coordinating through a stable, predictable atom (Standard Time), the alternate calendars are personal and local.They represent the changing daylight, phases of the moon, colours of the sky and blooming and withering flowers. These calendars (though less predictable, less
accurate) highlight who or what is in relationship with other beings and how. They undo the implicit distinction western societies make between ‘time of culture’ and 'time of nature’ by making them interdependent. The accompanying voicemails offer a peek into the elaborate socio-cultural polyrhythms influenced by the alternate calendars. They hint at other world views that foster & support diverse values of the time. In doing
so, they render alternate realities possible.
Our over-reliance on Standard Time has left us ill-equipped with other senses of time, especially in global crisis moments where synchronized, standardized time management is no longer possible. While our current calendar is a mathematical abstraction, our lived experience of time is divergent. What if calendars could support intuition, anticipation, care, or waiting? After all, calendars are ‘designed’ tools. They can therefore be redesigned. These tools can be reassembled to respond to temporal
challenges in new ways. While people wielding power have used these to exercise their authority, as a designer I employ timekeepers in ways that suggest intriguing possibilities of poetic interventions. Instead of dismissing timekeepers as hopelessly redeemable, the collective uses them to misappropriate, cheat or even steal time.
With the world in lockdown, the daily lives of millions of people are unmoored. Time is bent completely out of shape. This is a gentle reminder that exploring and adopting alternate calendars is no longer a far fetched thought. The pandemic has made our
time models partially permeable. As we brace ourselves for the new reality, I offer this collective to consciously traverse in ways previously unimagined or unimaginable.
The Project can be viewed here : www.calendarcollective.com
Audio-visual essay can be viewed here : https://vimeo.com/416958924
Department: Design and Technology
, The New School
Advisor(s): Richard The, Anne Harsanya, Liza Stark, Anthony Dunne, Fiona Rabi
