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# Project Description Time Trick ketong Shen Summary Final work Time Trick positions fashion artefacts not as wearable solutions, but as critical tools that operate between body, object, and meaning. By interrupting habitual gestures, the project encourages users to sense how deeply efficiency is embedded in everyday movement. These objects function as gentle resistance: they do not reject time, but make its control visibly fragile, ridiculous, and emotionally charged. Time Trick positions fashion artefacts not as wearable solutions, but as critical tools that oper... College London College of Fashion Course MA Fashion Artefact Graduation year 2025 Time Trick is a series of interactive fashion artefacts that critique contemporary society’s obsession with productivity, efficiency, and time control. Rather than helping users manage time more effectively, these objects deliberately disrupt everyday time-related actions, transforming them into slow, awkward, or absurd rituals. Through humour, mechanical repetition, and bodily participation, the project invites users to reflect on how time anxiety is socially constructed, internalised, and physically experienced. Final work High Time Normally, a person can simply lower their head or raise their wrist to see the time. But with this piece, the user must slowly pull a flag-raising mechanism to bring the clock face up to their eyes. The entire process appears solemn and ceremonial, reducing the action of looking down at the watch, but in reality, it is very time-consuming. One-second Advantage This device is inspired by the illusion that "pressing the elevator button in advance can save waiting time.Through a spring-launch mechanism, a fingertip push ejects a resin finger “one second ahead,” parodying our obsession with getting ahead. It satirizes how the desire to control time often deepens our anxiety instead. Time Delay The opposite of a one-second advantage: the user has to manually rotate a mechanism, making a 'finger' move forward slowly until it finally touches the button. While it appears to increase control and efficiency, it actually delays a simple action, creating a false sense of productivity and wasting more time. Slow Tempo This work deconstructs the movement logic of a metronome, using the dial as the counterweight of the metronome's pendulum, swinging left and right with its rhythm. Viewers must wait for the dial to 'return to the front' to briefly read the time, and they can also adjust the dial's height to change its swinging speed. This design uses the mechanical rhythm of a metronome to create an 'uncertain' sense of time rhythm. Research and process Time Blind This device uses an elliptical eccentric wheel to drive a vertical rod up and down, with the top of the rod connected to a translucent black lens made from sunglasses material. As the mechanism operates, the lens continuously covers and reveals the clock face, allowing time to be seen only briefly and vaguely. This 'visible yet unclear' effect symbolizes contemporary people's sense of helplessness in the face of time—the more they try to control it, the harder it becomes to grasp. The work reflects how, in modern efficiency-driven society, the more frequently people check the time, the more anxious they become. Cannot Wait This piece originates from my habit while waiting for web pages to load: when the loading is too slow, I would keep clicking the mouse rapidly, as if that could speed it up, but in reality, it only made me more anxious. I transformed this everyday anxious behavior into a mechanical structure: through a spring device, a resin finger repeatedly clicks the mouse after being pressed once. A previously controllable action becomes uncontrollable, symbolizing how anxiety takes over the body, amplifying a simple action into a continuous cycle of restlessness. Share this project Time Trick is a series of interactive fashion artefacts that critique contemporary society’s obsession with productivity, efficiency, and time control. Rather than helping users manage time more effectively, these objects deliberately disrupt everyday time-related actions, tra... A link to this page has been added to your clipboard Browse related work Body Anxiety Artefact Time Wood
# Links ## Official page - https://ualshowcase.arts.ac.uk/project/692278/cover ## External - https://www.instagram.com/katie Shen - tel:07925984906 - mailto:ketongshen575@gmail.com - https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https%3A%2F%2Fualshowcase.arts.ac.uk%2Fproject%2F692278%2Fcover&text=Time+Trick - https://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fualshowcase.arts.ac.uk%2Fproject%2F692278%2Fcover&media=https%3A%2F%2Fportfolio-tools.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2026%2F01%2F18182924%2F1201_shooting271441.jpg&description=Time+Trick