Saturday, May 05, 2007

Time: Subjective and Objective

One of my favorite things to have HCI students read is Tog's short description of an experiment showing the difference between objective and subjective time. (Tog also talks about the manipulation of time in the classic "Principles, Techniques, and Ethics of Stage Magic and Their Application to Human Interface Design" in which he talks about the mirrors-by-the-elevators anecdote (also repeated by Ackoff & Rovin in "The Ups and Downs of Elevators" section of Beating the system: Using creativity to outsmart bureaucracies and also appearing as a Joel on Software topic)).

Anyway, The whole point of this post is that Tog recently posted an update including a funny example of airlines that "get it" and "don't" when it comes to objective and subjective time. You can skip all that stuff above and read this :)