Designing Spaces to Influence Our Sense of Time

Environmental Tools for Time Perception

Nov 07, 2022

Introduction

Our lives are immersed in a world riddled with temporal illusions.

We cast a final blink each night and awaken to find ourselves teleported 8 hours into the future. We wait what feels like an eternity for the bus scheduled to arrive in 2 minutes. We play a quick game to pass the time, only to look at the clock and realise an entire hour has snuck by unnoticed.

What if we could take control of our temporal perception? If we could fast forward through unpleasant experiences and elongate the moments of bliss which we crave to last a lifetime.

“Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain and is shockingly easy to manipulate experimentally. We all know about optical illusions, in which things appear different from how they really are; less well known is the world of temporal illusions. When you begin to look for temporal illusions, they appear everywhere.”

— David Eagleman, Neuroscientist

The spaces that surround us have the ability to bend the way we think about and experience time. By changing the elements within spaces or by changing spaces altogether we can speed up or elongate the subjective timelines we routinely construct.

Scope of This Post

Question

How can we design spaces to influence our sense of time?

Defining “design spaces”

Changing elements within a space.
Changing from one space to another.

Defining “to influence”

Speed up our perception of time.
Elongate our perception of time.

Defining “sense of time”

Past: how we remember time.
Present: how we experience time.
Future: how we anticipate time.

The Remembered Moment — Remembering Time

“I can’t believe it’s September already! Where has the year gone? It feels like the year just started.”

The goal when designing environments for the remembered moment is to preemptively architect how we’ll reflect on the duration of our current period of time in the future.

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman draws a really interesting distinction between two lenses through which we view our lives: the experiencing self and the remembering self. Where our experiencing self is our fleeting consciousness at any given moment and our remembering self is our enduring storyteller.

By strategising ways to influence the way we remember moments we can edit our life stories. We can actively work to prevent the feeling that time has slipped through our fingers, and we might even be able to shrink the perceived timelines of the unpleasant periods in our lives.

Past: Speeding Up the Remembered Moment

How can we design and use spaces so that a period of time seems like a mere blip during the reflection of our timelines?

You know how the side-view mirrors on cars have that label, “objects in mirror are closer than they appear”?

Our perception of how long ago events occurred is the opposite of that. It seems that we have a natural bias toward thinking that events in our past occurred more recently than they actually did.

Telescoping

“The dating of events usually involves estimation. With the exception of important recurring events (such as birthdays and holidays) and extraordinary personal or historical events (e.g., the date the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima), the dates of events are rarely stored in memory. Survey research (e.g., Skogan, 1981) suggests that subjects often underestimate the age of an event, a bias termed telescoping.”
🔗 / Research Paper /

The theory is that we are more likely to have this bias when the time between now and the event in question has been pretty uneventful. If it’s one of the last vivid memories we created, then it will likely feel more recent.

Another theory suggests that we’re more likely to feel the effects of telescoping if we don’t have a temporal frame of reference for an event. If we know that an event occurred sometime right before our last birthday, we might be less vulnerable to a telescopic distortion.

Knowing these theories can be useful for building a more accurate inner chronometry (representation of timelines in our mind), but sometimes we might actually want to distance ourselves from a moment in time. So how can we use space as a tool to make a period of time feel shorter or make it feel further away in time than it actually was?

Spaces that Distance: Immersion in novel environments

Time is like a roll of toilet paper - the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes.

There’s a common anecdotal observation that time seems to speed up as we age. People say things like: “I feel like I’m still in my 20s” and “I can remember high school like it was just yesterday.”

The most accepted theory on why some people feel this way is that they create less unique memories in adulthood compared to their childhood.

So when it comes to using our surroundings as a tool to distance ourselves from the past, it makes sense that we should try to make as many new memories as possible.

Travelling to new places, for example, might be a solid way to process grief. Each new experience on our trip could cause our minds to perceive that more time has elapsed since the cause of our grief. The idea behind this being that we’d make an event feel further away and ultimately shorter in retrospect by making the time in between now and then feel longer.

Spaces that Shrink: Make it as bland as possible

Creating forgettable moments isn’t usually a goal that we aspire to, but in some cases, maybe it could be a good strategy for cushioning anticipatory embarrassment.

Imagine, for example, that you’ve been invited at the last minute to fill in for someone who couldn’t make it to a webinar. You’re not in the right headspace for a talk, you’ve got the script, but you don’t really know or resonate with the material, and you don’t want people to remember how much you’re likely to fumble over the material. This might be one of those forgettable moments worth designing for.

Since we now know the role that novelty can play in memory formation, it seems that the goal here might be to try and ensure that neither you nor your audience have too much novelty to hold onto. If there’s nothing worth remembering in the present moment, then our minds are likely to not bother creating long-lasting memory for it.

So maybe the strategy here would be to design our space to be as bland as possible, by reducing the quality of our video, and removing bright and bold colours from screen view, for example.

Those were just a couple of examples for how we might be able to design and use spaces to speed up and shrink our reflections of our timelines. But it seems that getting creative with how we use novelty in our environments can be a tactic for planning which present moments we want to hold on to and which past moments we want to distance from.

Past: Elongating the Remembered Moment

How can we design and use spaces so that a moment seems to last a lifetime?

There’s that saying, “time flies when we’re having fun”. Some people have noticed, however, that not all fun translates to long-lasting memories. Think back to the last time you played one of your favourite video games or worked on one of your recurring hobbies. You likely enjoyed yourself in the moment, but you might notice that your memory of that event feels faded or distant. Whereas, if you were to think back to your last fun vacation, you might notice yourself being able to recall that time in greater detail.

Why might one fun experience have more influence on the remembered moment over another fun experience? Research suggests that this difference can likely be attributed to the number and novelty of new memories each provides to us.

Holiday Paradox

The Holiday Paradox is the contradictory feeling when a holiday feels like it’s flying by while we’re experiencing it in the moment, but overtime in retrospect, we perceive it as having lasted longer.

The way we think about past durations has a lot to do with how many memories we’ve created within those times in question. And with a little bit of creative thinking we might be able to use that logic to design spaces that can enhance our perception of longevity.

Spaces that Cupid Recommends

I’m calling it Cupid’s Illusion of Familiarity: the more novel experiences we make with someone, the more likely we are to feel familiar with that person, because the novelty makes us feel like we’ve spent more time with them. In other words, based on the logic that more novel memories can translate to longer perception of time, it seems that going on dates in various unique date spots could likely lead to feelings of increased closeness.

Spaces that Calibrate our Cognitive Timelines

We learned earlier about telescoping and how we have a natural bias toward fast-forwarding through our uneventful timelines. Which means that if we want to create more accurate depictions of our perception of our past timelines, then we’ll have to work to elongate those uneventful periods in our mind. So the question becomes, how can we set up our current environment to prevent telescoping?

Two of the main factors we mentioned which contribute to telescoping were temporal landmarks (particularly notable days: birthday, holiday, etc.) and the number of novel memories we’ve created between now and then. Taking advantage of these two conditions, perhaps we could bypass telescoping by making it a point to switch up our interior design on a more frequent basis. By decorating our place for Halloween or changing the colour of our curtains based on the season, maybe those could be enough to constitute a new temporal landmark in our minds.

Spaces that feel Like Home

What makes a house a home? For some it might be the feeling elicited by the memories they’ve made there. For others, it might be how its interior design and aesthetics make them feel. I think that in any case, the feeling of home has a temporal component to it. As cozy as a hotel room on vacation might be, it rarely ever feels like home. So how can we design our spaces to feel like we’ve developed an enduring connection with it?

Similar to the previous two sections, I wonder if adding novelty to our spaces more frequently would result in making it feel like we’ve been there longer. I’d assume that the more often we make unique switch ups, the more memories we create in relation to our place. And the more memories we create, the longer it feels like we’ve been living there.

Overall, when it comes to making our past experiences feel like they lasted longer than they actually did, creating new and rich memories appears to be the key. And getting creative with strategies for designing and using spaces to facilitate those memory formations seems to have a lot of practical implications.

The Present Moment — Experiencing Time

I’ve always hated presenting. I remember times in school when I knew my name was next up to be called, but it was so close to the end of class that whether I presented that day or the next completely depended on how quickly time moved and how slowly the person before me spoke. Every single time, in my state of panic, I remember desperately staring at the clock and frantically pleading with it to stop moving in slow motion.

There are several theories as to why and when time feels to us like its either dilating or contracting:

Empty vs Full Theory

Whether you feel time as being long lasting or short lasting depends on whether the activities we’re doing are empty or full:

Empty: when what we’re doing feels monotonous, not stimulating, and unimportant to us, time will seem to pass by slowly.

Full: when we’re doing something novel, full of sensations, challenging, or where there’s a lot of context changing, time will seem to pass by quickly.

Time Awareness Explanation

The belief that time feels like it’s going by quickly when an activity is full because we’re not preoccupied with thinking about time. If we’re not attending to it, because we’re busy with something else, then we won’t notice how much time has passed.

Neuroscience Observations

The more dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain, the more likely we are to feel like time is moving quickly.

Dopamine is the molecule of motivation, pursuit, and drive. Also, heightened states of arousal (either positive or negative arousal).

Contrary to the theories and observations above, I think that our mindset plays a bigger role than the activity we’re doing or our biology. My personal belief is that the main decider of whether time feels like it’s moving fast or slow is simply whether we want it to move fast or slow. If we want time to move fast, it’s gonna move slowly. And when we want time to move slowly, it’s gonna speed by.

The paradoxical problem with my theory is that, it’s tough to try to control how we feel about the speed of the time passing by, because in order to get the speed that we desire we need to want the opposite speed (if we want time to move faster, we have to want it to move more slowly). So those other theories come with the benefit of putting the onus of our time perception on mostly external variables which we have more control over.

Present: Speeding Up the Present Moment

How can we design and use spaces so that it feels as though we are fast forwarding through the current moment?

Side note: Whenever I get the urge to want to fast-forward through an unpleasant situation in my life, the movie Click pops into my mind and I worry that my internal remote is going to eventually malfunction and put me on auto-pilot while I start fast-forwarding through any similar situation I’d come across in the future. So this is a power I tend to use sparingly.

Spaces that Play Uptempo Music

”The present study investigated the effects of musical tempo and music presence on duration estimations and content recall of a video advertisement. Thirty male and thirty female participants took part in this study. They were divided into 2 groups and a control group. The first group saw the advertisement with fast-tempo music, the second saw the same advertisement with slow-tempo music. The control group saw the advertisement in silence. According to previous research and theories it was hypothesised that music tempo would have an effect on duration estimations and content recall. The findings revealed that participants in the high tempo condition gave shorter duration estimates than in other conditions.”
🔗 / Research /

In other words, this study showed that an advertisement with uptempo music influenced it’s participants to think that it was shorter than the same advertisement with slow-tempo music.

The potential practical application being that having uptempo music playing in our space might make time feel like it’s going by more quickly.

Spaces that Make Us Cold

Research shows that cold exposure can spike dopamine levels in our systems.

“Dopamine is a powerful molecule capable of elevating mood, enhancing focus, attention, goal-directed behaviour, etc. Even short bouts of cold exposure can cause a lasting increase in dopamine and sustained elevation of mood, energy, and focus.”
🔗 / Lab Findings /

As mentioned in the neuroscience section above, dopamine has a hand in making us believe more time has elapsed than the true reality. If I was to imagine hopping into an ice bath, I’d imagine that a minute felt like an hour too.

Spaces with Blue Lights

The video above conducts a mini experiment that shows how immersion in an environment lit up with blue light can make 49 seconds feel like a minute — the feeling that time is moving more quickly than reality.

I personally believe that the results could be related to how red vs blue light influences our circadian rhythms (our internal clock that estimates the timeline of a single day — circadian comes from the Latin “circa diem” which roughly translates to “approximately a day”). My understanding of the circadian system goes something like: when we wake up each day, we’re exposed to initial daylight (blue light) → that triggers our body to stop secreting melatonin → which tells our brain that it’s morning → our dopamine levels are particularly high in the morning → dopamine tends to make us perceive time as moving faster.

”Huberman explains that your circadian rhythm (i.e. your body clock) plays a huge role in your Dopamine levels and therefore your perception of time. In the morning, your brain is flooded with Dopamine, giving you that feeling of wakefulness and motivation that most people are familiar with after a good night's sleep."
🔗 / Article /

I personally think that the best strategies for influencing our sense of experienced time would somehow involve targeting our mindset. But, from what I can see, the main mindset tactic to make time feel like it’s going by quickly would be to convince ourselves that we actually want time to move slowly. Since, that seems to be a bit counter-intuitive, we at least have these few environmental factors that demonstrate an ability to speed up our perception of the present moment instead.

Present: Elongating the Present Moment

How can we design and use spaces so that the current moment seems to pass by in slow motion?

Sometimes we just want to bask in a bliss-filled moment — those borderline spiritual ones when we’re having such a great time we want to appreciate every single second and we want as many of those seconds as we can get.

Whenever I’m immersed in one of those moments I think about all those superhero movies with a character who has super speed or reflexes, like Spider Man.

https://media.tenor.com/a13rdk-IJUkAAAAC/bh187-spiderman.gif

When his spidey senses kick in, his reflexes move so quickly that everything around him appears to move in slow motion. Acknowledging the obvious fact that this is fiction, I can’t help but wonder if there’s any truth to the idea that we can train and enhance our cognition speed and reaction time, so that we might be able to slow things down too.

2x Speed Environment Immersion

I almost always watch YouTube videos in 2x speed. I notice that if I’m truly engaged with its content, listening intently to every word, and trying to actively think about its topic, the world around me seems to be moving in a slower motion after the video ends. Similarly, if I was to watch a 15 minute video at 2x speed and then return it back down to 1x on the 14 minute mark, then it would appear to me that the rest of the video is playing even more slowly than simply 1x speed.

It got me wondering, what if we were to spend a day wearing a virtual reality headset, tuned into an exact replica of our reality. One that was unfolding before our eyes at double or even triple times normal speed. Would a similar slow motion effect ensue after taking off the headset? Would we perceive true reality unfolding more slowly in front of us? If we made a habit of this practice, could we train our cognition to function at a faster pace?

Moving away from my sci-fi musings, there is evidence that our real-world spaces have the ability to slow down our perception of time as well.

Spaces Airing Scary Movies

”People shown extracts from films known to induce fear often overestimated the elapsed time of a subsequently presented visual stimulus, whereas people shown emotionally neutral clips (weather forecasts and stock market updates) or those known to evoke feelings of sadness showed no difference. It is argued that fear prompts a state of arousal in the amygdala, which increases the rate of a hypothesized "internal clock". This could be the result of an evolved defensive mechanism triggered by a threatening situation.[100] Individuals experiencing sudden or surprising events, real or imagined (e.g., witnessing a crime, or believing one is seeing a ghost), may overestimate the duration of the event.[87]”
🔗 / Wikipedia /

Spaces at the Front of the Train

We’ll sometimes hear baseball players claim that they’ve been playing the game for so long that now, when the ball is coming at them, it almost seems that time is moving in a slower motion.

Some research supports these self-reported experiences and they’ve dubbed this phenomenon the “time dilation effect”. It suggests that in moments when something is coming toward us, time can appear to slow down.

So if considering how we might use our spaces to take advantage of this effect, we might consider environments like the front car of a train where the world looks as though it’s coming toward us. It makes me wonder what it might feel like to choose this spot to meditate in, for example. Would a 5 minute meditation session in the front car of a train give us the impression that we’ve been meditating for 15 minutes instead?

Spaces that Scare Us

”Anxious people, or those in great fear, experience greater "time dilation" in response to the same threat stimuli due to higher levels of epinephrine, which increases brain activity (an adrenaline rush).[92] In such circumstances, an illusion of time dilation could assist an effective escape.[93][94]”
🔗 / Wikipedia /

Spaces that Stress Us Out

”A study in which people with arachnophobia were asked to look at spiders — the very object of their intense fear — for 45 seconds and they overestimated the elapsed time. The same pattern was observed in novice skydivers, who estimated the duration of their peers’ falls as short, whereas their own, from the same altitude, were deemed longer.”
🔗 / Article /

Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of the research out there suggests that in order to make the current moment appear to pass by in slow motion we need to experience some level of stress or fear. Luckily, not all stress or fear has to be bad or traumatic. First kisses, adrenaline rich activities, and expanding our comfort zones can all be healthy daunting experiences. So strategising how to incorporate a healthy level of stress into our environments might be the way to go if we want to elongate our present moments.

The Prospected Moment — Anticipating Time

“I just can’t for the life of me comprehend the disturbed psychology of oblivious slow walkers who impede the traffic of bustling city sidewalks.” — Every fast-walker ever.

https://media.giphy.com/media/GYA6gpMc1xqU/giphy.gif

Head downtown to sightsee in any major city and we’re bound to witness the inevitably contentious interaction between these two urban species: the slow vs the fast walkers. The ones who are in no rush and who appear to have an abundance of time at their disposal. Versus the ones who seem to be in a perpetual race and never able to find enough time. This is the essence of prospected time. How much time do we feel we have left and how much time do we think something will take.

Future: Speeding Up Prospected Time

How can we design and use spaces so that we feel the pressure of impending time constraints?

In one of my favourite movies, Last Holiday, Queen Latifa’s character is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and given a prognosis of only 3 weeks left to live.

What would you do if you only had three weeks left to live? If the vision you had for your entire future had been fast-forwarded to fit within the confines of the next few weeks?

Among the main benefits of speeding up prospected time are the intensified feeling of motivation and the revitalised desire to abandon any instinct we might have had to waste time.

Parkinson’s Law

“The amount of work expands to fill the time available for its completion. If you give yourself a week to complete a two-hour task, then (psychologically speaking) the task will increase in complexity and become more daunting so as to fill that week.”
🔗 / Post /

Parkinson’s Law suggests to me that if we think we don’t have much time left, then we can use that as a motivation booster and be more intentional about how we spend our time.

Spaces that Remind Us of Death

Memento mori (Latin for 'remember that you [have to] die') are symbols that serve as a reminder of the inevitability of our death.

Perhaps, decorating our spaces with a skull or two, or spending time in a graveyard could act as that reminder to appreciate the time constraint that death ensures.

Spaces that Make Us Feel Rushed

We’ve seen how to manipulating our perception of time can be a useful tool, but we might find benefit in using it to skew others’ perceptions of time as well. By designing spaces that make people feel rushed we might essentially be able to speed up their sense of prospected time.

I’m imagining, for example, that we have immutable plans with someone who gets carried away and talks too much. Perhaps, executing those plans in an environment that makes them feel rushed could be a good way to make them feel time-constrained.

So what would these environments look like? Well we know that people tend to feel rushed when they want more time and they’re highly aware of the clock. So brainstorming places and situations that accentuate those two features might be the way to go.

I think that incorporating some variation of clocks, countdowns, and calendars might be the key to designing and using spaces so that we feel the pressure of impending time constraints. It seems that speeding up our sense of prospected time might be a matter of becoming more aware of time itself.

Future: Elongating Prospected Time

How can we design and use spaces so that we feel as though we have an abundance of time at our disposal?

Considering we sleep on average 8 hours a night and there are 24 hours in a day, it’s safe to say that we spend nearly 1/3 of our lives sleeping. So, how would you feel if you were to wake up tomorrow morning in an alternate reality where humans evolved to not need any sleep? How would you design your schedule for the upcoming week? What would you add in? What would you do more of? What would you start doing?

Time Wealth

The feeling of being unconstrained by time pressures.

While speeding up prospected time can be a great tool for sparking motivation, it’s also a frequent sensation in a lot of our lives. We’ve got deadlines, prioritised lists of todos, and goals after goals. Elongating prospected time offers respite from those pressures and our spaces can serve as powerful tools for finding time wealth.

Spaces that Inspire Awe

”Research has suggested the feeling of awe has the ability to expand one's perceptions of time availability. Awe can be characterized as an experience of immense perceptual vastness that coincides with an increase in focus. Consequently, it is conceivable that one's temporal perception would slow down when experiencing awe.[86]”
🔗 / Wikipedia /

Spaces for Rest & Relaxation

Some spaces built for rest and relaxation, like spas, are design to give us a sense of time abundance. So perhaps understanding and employing similar elements to theirs could be a way for us to gift ourselves elongated prospected time.

In addition to the environments that inherently offer or are designed to provide time wealth, we also have the ability to actively create it for ourselves.

Spaces that Buy Us Time

“Before the cacophony of family breakfast and your commute, you sneak a rare walk in the early morning light, cicada rifling the air. From nowhere, it seems, a faint line of words arises in your mind, a possible solution related to a problem at work, a solution you’ve sought for over a week. Before you lose it, you pull out your pocket notebook and scribble the line that leads to more clarity. A five-minute walk, you think, saved you hours of grief at work. You head back home, ready for the squawl of pre-school talk and eggs and traffic. This is an experience of shaping time (taking a five-minute walk), experiencing the mind’s wonder in an ordinary setting (a neighborhood road), and actually making time (the time-saving solution arose effortlessly).”
🔗 / Article /

I think that giving ourselves the space to forget about time might be the key to elongating our sense of prospected time. When we’re not worried about how little time we have left, then perhaps we feel that we have all of the time in the world. And that sense of empowerment is what makes us time wealthy.

Conclusion

Our lives are immersed in a world riddled with temporal illusions, but we have the ability to use those illusions to our advantage, in order to design and use our spaces as tools to influence our sense of time.

And just like how time has both an objective and a subjective side, we can both rely on what research says about how we perceive time and we can get creative and figure out our own unique relationship with time.

I see the the temporal world in terms of past, present, and future. A continuum influenced by speed and novelty. But perhaps, your perspective isn’t as linear. Perhaps in your lens time is not unfolding, but prewritten. Perhaps you see time as not linear, but circular. Perhaps you don’t view time as moving on a horizontal axis, but a vertical one. Our individual perspectives and relationships with time are likely to be unique to some degree when compared to one another. So the environmental solutions that we consider for ourselves should probably take our unique differences into consideration.