In the Interest of Time: Plural and Relational Temporalities in Modern Life

Modern life is organized around the relentless ticking of the clock, a system of timekeeping whose roots stretch back to industrial and colonial histories. This standardized, mechanical approach has become the dominant orientation, shaping everything from our workdays to our collective sense of the future. Yet beneath its veneer of efficiency, clock-time has crowded out plural, embodied, and relational ways of experiencing temporality: cycles and rhythms attuned to ecology, ritual, community, and memory. This article explores what is lost when time is flattened into a metric and asks what might be regained by remembering and reimagining its multiplicity. Through a synthesis of cultural critique and design-led research, we seek to illuminate alternative temporal infrastructures that foster belonging, care, and renewal for diverse communities and more-than-human worlds.