¿Qué hora tiene?, Translated to – “What hour do you have?”
We often hear people in Costa Rica asking time on the streets in this manner, and the answers you get are usually not precise, something like “it’s about 1 pm”. Or when you ask a friend how long you would take to reach here, they say “like in about 10 minutes”, which can mean another hour. This loose concept of time in the local Costa Rican context is called “Tic@ time”, and this is where the idea of the project comes from.

Siento Doce is a clock that tells time based on the average time told by the Tico/Tica (Tic@) community.

The pace of the modern world which requires people to be always on time and efficient sometimes can be stressful and demanding. This project aims to encourage people to see time as a relative concept. The uncertainty of the Tic@ time forces you to slow down and appreciate the Tic@ culture.

Dial 112 to ask for time

• How the device works, first, you dial 112 to ask for the time.
• People in the tic@ community reply with their own approximation of the time.
• The machine counts and sends you the average of all the submitted time.

In the past, in Costa Rica, you could dial 112 on your landline to ask for time, and the machine would reply with the current time. This service doesn’t exist anymore. The project is trying to bring back the nostalgic feeling of dialing 112 into the device.

The design process

Siento Doce was a one-day project. The brief was to create a tangible device that explores the concept of people-to-time connection, keeping in mind the local Costa Rican context at a city scale.

Due to the time constraints and the technical-heavy nature of the assignment, the design process involved quick brainstorming on the ideas, followed by immediate prototyping using an Arduino Nano, neo pixel ring, laser cutting MDF board, and acrylic.

School: Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design

Class: Connected Objects

Faculty: Nikolaj “Dzl” Møbius, Olivia Prior, Omid Ettehadi & Vanessa Julia Carpenter

Students: Aakash Dewan, Jose Chavarría & Martin Altanie.