• Perspective 1. Drawing of a sunset and birds...

has. We all know that we as users often prefer a certain amount of control, but do we need as much control as in juxtaposed time? There is something to gain in staying close to reality too; World of Warcraft is mesmerizing in part because battles are fought whether or not you are there to participate.

Using Time in Design

• Perspective 2. ...and a couple of lovers at the beach, while the sun slowly sets— or rather shrinks—into the ocean.

To answer Theo’s original question, and to explore the themes, we imagined a small,

simple drawing application that would allow the user to do only one thing: draw lines. Then we asked, what if? What if one applies fragmented time, real time, or any other one of the themes to this very basic application?

• Perspective 3. Now the sun is almost gone. There is space around and behind the couple where hills and trees appear.

The result was four drawing applications that apply time in different ways. We tested them ourselves but also let others try them; four users have tested each one, plus a class of 10 interaction designers. If you want to try visit http://demo. iconara.net/temporal-paint/ and let us know how it goes!

In the first application, Echo, the lines you draw gradually fade away by becoming thinner and thinner (unbroken

• Perspective 4. More hills and trees are added as the couple becomes more distant.

July + August 2009

interactions

• Perspective 5. All the initial parts of the drawing are gone, and the scene has changed from a romantic evening at the beach to a rocky desolated hillside.

time) until they disappear completely. After a more or less random interval, they reappear as “echoes” (fragmented time), only to again fade away, and come back, and so on. This was quite frustrating to the users, first because it took a while before they understood how the application worked, and second, because the user had no control whatsoever over when a certain line would reappear. A common strategy was to draw

the same lines over and over again to make sure they would “stay,” or rather that some instance of them was echoed at every moment in time. Only a few test subjects utilized the echo-effect by creating something that could be described as a mix between an animation and an association game; once some lines had disappeared, new lines were added, changing the motif from, say, a house to a flag. When we later added the possibility of drawing static lines by pressing Ctrl, the application changed drastically. We instantly developed a technique to draw animated scenes, such as drawing a static cloud and echoing lines as “rain” under it.

The second application, Perspective, was inspired by perspective drawings. Thus, the lines in Perspective slowly move toward the center of the canvas (real time), shrinking in the process, so that it appears if the user is zooming out. This zooming effect is almost immediately visible, and most test subjects quickly understood what happened. Also, the pace is slow enough for the users to plan what they wanted to do. Since the effect was predictable, most users felt at ease in a way that we did not see with Echo. All but one user worked with the effect, drawing typical perspective drawings, such as a long street stretching toward the center of the canvas. Again we added a feature, by allowing users to change the direction and/or speed of how lines moved (changing the theme to unbroken time), but in this case the change did not encourage any entirely new drawing approaches.