Sessions
Twelve weeks on the design of delay, from the gap between clock time and felt time to the question of who is asked to wait.
Every system you use has decided how long you will wait and what you will be told while you do. This course treats that decision as design work: the thresholds, the progress indicators, the hold scripts, the queues, and the politics of who is asked to wait. You will log your own waits, take one apart, and redesign a wait you are not permitted to shorten.
The lecture is Tuesday and the workshop is Thursday, every week. Weeks 1 to 6 build the techniques and weeks 7 to 12 ask who they are pointed at.
Teaching stops for a fortnight after week 6 and resumes on 12 April. A course about waiting has a two week gap in the middle of it, and that is the only time this page will mention it.
The Clock and the Feeling
Week 1. Measured duration and felt duration are two different quantities, and the gap between them is what this course studies.
Week 1 · 15 February 2027
Three Thresholds
Week 2. The perception gap becomes engineering. Three numbers decide which affordance a delay is given.
Week 2 · 22 February 2027
The Throbber
Week 3. The indeterminate spinner communicates only that something is happening. This week asks what the silence around that is for.
Week 3 · 1 March 2027
Ninety-Nine Percent
Week 4. Determinate progress, where the system tells you something and the something is false.
Week 4 · 8 March 2027
The Labour Illusion
Week 5. Showing the work as a substitute for doing it faster, and what that licenses.
Week 5 · 15 March 2027
Occupied Time
Week 6. The techniques that consume a waiting person's attention rather than reducing the wait they are in.
Week 6 · 22 March 2027
Fairness Before Speed
Week 7. Duration and justice come apart, and people choose the slower queue when it is the fair one.
Week 7 · 12 April 2027
Hold Music
Week 8. What you are given during a wait is authored material, with a genre, a history and an economics.
Week 8 · 19 April 2027
Who Waits
Week 9. Waiting is distributed, the distribution is produced, and the queue is an instrument rather than a side effect.
Week 9 · 26 April 2027
Benevolent Deception
Week 10. Delay added rather than removed, and the question of who an added second is for.
Week 10 · 3 May 2027
The Remembered Wait
Week 11. The wait you report is not the wait you had, and the last minute decides how the whole thing is remembered.
Week 11 · 10 May 2027
Designing a Wait
Week 12. The studio week, where interventions are defended against the thesis rather than against a rubric.
Week 12 · 17 May 2027