The Time Killer Machine is a critical object that is supposed to make the user think about their daily use of social networks like Facebook. Often we find ourselves scrolling through a newsfeed of friends' posts that always seem the same. Somebody got married, someone else complains about life and another friend posted a photo of their dinner. Most of us have contacts who fit into a certain category of people who always seem to post the same kinds of things. And even though we usually don't learn anything new while reading their posts, it is easy to spend hours and hours staring at the screen anyway, refreshing the page for more useless information.
The Time Killer Machine transports the process of scrolling through posts into an analog object. A blinking led, similar to the led we know from notifications on our phone, constantly lets the user know that there are more messages to read, if they scroll up. The blinking transports a feeling of urgency, which shall trigger the user's curiosity. Scrolling works by turning a physical handle, which will then move the paper screen. The screen is full of stereotypical messages, inspired by our research of real Facebook posts.
Since it is a loop, there will always be "new" messages. We want to test how much time the user spends with the Time Killer Machine and how fast they will realize that they are wasting their time in a senseless loop. And even though this object obviously exaggerates reality, we hope to make the user rethink their own usage of social networks in the end.
This project by Marianna Nikulshina, Yasmin Nielsen and Annika Engelhardt was part of the 'Inside the Blackbox' seminar by Ralf Baecker at the University of Arts, Bremen.