Dan Nguyen

Most young adults entering the workforce face around 45 years of full-time work, yet the scale of that time is difficult to grasp. This practiceled project asks: “how can an interactive publication reshape how young adults entering the workforce perceive and value their time, through layered, tactile design?” Killing Time takes its title from a double meaning: time passed idly, and time taken away. The project is framed by three contexts: felt time, the way emotion, the body and age bend our sense of time; scope neglect, the difficulty humans have in grasping large numbers and long spans; and the social culture of killing time through work and distraction. Using divergent thinking, cross-disciplinary research, moodboards, material experimentation, prototyping and feedback, the project developed a publication with an aluminium archive-file cover, layered tracing paper pages, an infinity cube and a calendar that counts down the years to retirement. The outcome translates a working life into units small enough to feel, such as weeks, pages and layers, and presents lives lost by name rather than as numbers. Rather than offering a solution to overwork, the project aims to change perspective, making visible how little time remains for ourselves and suggesting that this arrangement is not inevitable.