Diagrams Concerning the Representation of Human Time is a study that aims to correct the representation of human temporality in the economic sciences. To achieve this, we used a Cartesian coordinate system to bring together the epistemology of the narrative function within the phenomenology of time-experience.
Economists have long favoured formal demonstrations over empirical research to work out fundamental laws regarding the production, consumption, and transfer of wealth. In this respect, such an intensely theoretical discipline shares closer affinities with para-Pythagoreans than the practical methodologies of physical scientists. Like Hippocrates of Chios’s demonstration of how to square the lune, the ubiquity of mathematical proofs and geometric forms used by economists lend a timeless quality to the laws and principles they expound. Equally revealing, is the case of Hippocrates himself: although considered to be an excellent geometer, Aristotle reported him to be just as stupid as he was incompetent in the business of ordinary life.
Given time’s widespread utilization in measuring the evolution of production and consumption, as well as to represent a basic unit of labour, it is a curiosity that economists have had little to say or contribute towards temporal conceptualization. At best, economists depict time as a unidirectional, irreversible line - a one-way street. This practice (inspired by Newtonian physics), however useful it may be in representations of a simplistic chronology, fails to take into account time’s more critical phenomenological characteristics: the centrality of the present as an actual now; the primacy of the future as the main orientation of human desire; and the capacity to recollect the past in the present.
In response to these distortions of perspective, we devised a series of visual experiments that combine established scientific methods of representation with those found in literature and graphic design-disciplines with a greater concurrent engagement and experience with alternate representations and expressions of temporality. First, we utilized an x-y coordinate system to create simple variations on the theme of chronological time; then, we experimented with the shaping effect of narrative on human temporality. From there, we designed visual metaphors to communicate the essential relationships that were being mapped out in an attempt to rectify errors observed in the first two experiments.
Diagrams Concerning the Representation of Human Time (2009)