See many more examples here:

• Golan Levin, Visualizing Time
• Paolo Perdicini, Visualizing Time
• Joshua Foer, A Minor History of Time Without Clocks

History of Measuring Time

Measuring and visualizing time is long running human project that brings together histories of technological experimentation, politics, religion and environmental measurement and observation. Early attempts to measure time were often based on environmental observations such as tracking the position of the sun, or measuring the movement of sand or water through a device or through observing other organisms.

The first timekeeper is likely the gnomon, a vertical rod that casts its shadow on the ground.

 

A similar strategy is used in sun dials that have also been found to exist since BC 1500 in ancient Rome and Greece.

Hour glasses were used in churches to time the length of the sermon; long sermons were especially popular in the 17th century, and could easily stretch to three hours or more.

 

 

In the 1800s Carl Linnaeus who invented our system of taxonomy made flower clocks and calendars popular. He claimed that the time could accurately be told by observing several types of flowers and how they open close and track the sun. Gardeners would make elaborate plantings of these different types of flowers to show the passage of the year.

 

 

 

For a more contemporary attempt of telling the time by observing other organisms, the Phenology Clock, maps the timing of events in different species lives across a year.

Time and Networks

The introduction of railways across Europe and the USA in the 1800s created a need for time synchronicity across distances.

Today, computer networks continue to drive the development of technologies to synchronize time more precisely.

Different Design Approaches to Time

Time zones clock

http://www.dezeen.com/2010/07/26/the-bent-hands-by-giha-woo-and-shingoeun/

Knitting Clock

www.sirenelisewilhelmsen.com

Time and art

John Maeda 12 o’clocks

Thank you Golan for porting all 12 of these clocks to GIFs.

Here’s Sweeper Clock by Maarten Bas, a movie featuring two men with brooms pushing lines of debris to form moving clock hands.

Last Clock

Another, All the Minutes is a clock comprised of tweets about the current time.

A well-known ‘crowdsourced’ clock (in a different sense) is Christian Marclay’s Clock, a 24-hour film made up of six or seven thousand clips, each of which either says or displays the (actual) time of day or makes a cogent reference to time.