Designed by Andrea Karina Burgueno, Stephanie Lukito and Ricardo Dutra
Is it possible to layer time within one city? What might this look like?
Peak commuting hours in cities cause traffic jams, accidents and stress. Regardless of efforts such as car-sharing or increased public transit, the routine of daily life dictates that people travel at similar times during the course of a day.
Instead of employing traditional means of traffic mitigation, this project inverts the way we think about scheduling. Why not change time itself? Can multiple time zones exist within one city?
Provocation: Organize New York City into three different time zones, called Interzones. Interzone 2 (IZ2) is the standard time zone. Interzone 1 is two hours before IZ2. Interzone 3 is two hours after IZ2. Work schedules could remain 9-5, they would just be staggered to mitigate congestion.
How might this look like?
In addition to city infrastructure and helpful products, government oversight is a critical piece to the success of Interzone. New York City would establish a Department of Time to manage outreach, organization, and oversight of the new initiative.
The chart below chronicles a plausible day in the life of a family operating through three different Interzones. A professional who rises first can take her lunch break with a night owl artist who is just then getting up for breakfast.
Feasibility aside, the power of this project is its provocation. By speculating a possible future, the experiment prompted a discussion of various cultural shifts and questions that might occur if something like this were to happen.
About the project - Graduate students from Parsons Transdisciplinary Design MFA program partnered with Ford Motor Company and visiting scholars from the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship to imagine the future of mobility with speculative design.
At the core of this project was the application of speculative design. Pioneered by designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, it is defined as a "means of speculating about how things could be, as a tool to create not only things but ideas." More than proposing solutions, speculative design is about creating conversations.
