ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 deals with how designers can work time into an object and thereby increase its emotional and aesthetic value. Designing a temporal object is a way of creating a bond between subject and object by adding aesthetic value to the object, and hence prolonging its lifespan. The three time categories—the time of becoming, the time of existence, and the time of being—are three different, yet interconnected, ways of charging a design object with time. Whereas the time of becoming involves making the design process manifest in the form of visible or tactile traces in the object, working the time of existence into an object involves designing it in such a way that it will age gracefully or decay aesthetically. The time of being is inspired by the phenomenological approach to detecting, rather than decoding, objects. It is associated with the interplay between a subject and an object, and can be of either long or short duration, depending on the complexity of the object. All three time categories focus on the aesthetic experience itself.
