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It all started with the seemingly innocent question of how a holistic view of rhythms+time might impact my life and my practice as a creative designer?

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

R+D is the practical and intentional application of a rhythms approach to my design practice. What might it add to the wider discipline of design?

The idea of a rhythms approach to design - Rhythms+Design - creeped into my work as a graduate student in design at the University of Texas at Austin. During this period of my life, when I was seven hours behind my family in Austria and plunged into a new soundscape of birds and insects and their peculiar rhythms it dawned on me (pun intended) that timing and rhythms are important things to consider, or at least to keep in mind, when designing for the world of today and tomorrow. I started to realise how my quantifications of and approaches to life have been guided by a machine metaphor of my body and life, and instead I came to see that the value lies in the things that are hard to measure with traditional methods and ideas, like the behaviours we create and accumulate among each other and the routines and rituals we develop to aspire towards higher goals.

I call the continuous exploration of the impact of time and rhythms on my life Chronodesign.

I am fascinated by the rhythmicity of life and the impact and consequences of it on modern life. There is so much I have to learn, much I want to talk about and much more to create. I don’t pretend to be the well of rhythms+time knowledge but rather want to put the idea of a rhythms approach out there into the design consciousness.

What I am hoping for is that other creative and curios designers will pick it up and add or improve on my thinking and experiments.

 
 
 
 
 

“and he rose around noon when lunch was prepared and he shall be called sunny boy from this day forth!” - my parents, grandparents, brother and uncle

Time and its play with the natural rhythms has been a steady companion for me. I often felt out of synch with time - that of others, of convention and of industrial standard. I don’t proclaim some special bond with time or anything similar, but through the course of my life it has become an active ingredient I had to wrestle with. Siestas in Barcelona accompanied with midnight cenas, light in the sky until late at night during the summer months in the United Kingdom and a seven hour difference between my home in Austria and my temporary dwelling in Austin, Texas. There just wasn’t a way around confronting time and how it relates to natural rhythms (my own or environmental) when it kept creeping into my life and thoughts. Even from my early childhood my body craved a different rhythm than those around me. Sometimes for the better but more often the squeezing of my body into the rigid clock time of modern industrial civilisation caused more harm than I was able to be aware at that moment of my life.

 
 
 
 

Christoph Sokol is a multidisciplinary designer with too many design interests to count. He grew up in Vienna, Austria and spent his early twenties in Barcelona, Spain where he earned his B.A. in product design with a focus on transportation design from IED Barcelona. After getting his car design toes wet at SEAT as a car exterior design intern, Christoph held a creative design position at Jaguar Land Rover Design Research and Innovation in the UK. In the summer of 2020 he moved to the United States to pursue his MFA in design from The University of Texas at Austin. He is passionate about design (in all its diversity), art, literature and poetry, woodworking, forest bathing and reading about trees. He is weird about food but enjoys cooking. He sleeps when others are awake and is awake when others are asleep (but he’s working on that).