Frame201903-04

As a teacher of MA

Information Experience

Design at the Royal College

of Art, where she completed

a PhD, HELGA SCHMID

brings both practice-led and

research-based experience

to ̒The Challenge.

because it’s up to us to change our educa-

tional systems and to ask ourselves how

much we want to force our children to remain

in today’s rigid situation.

What would we learn in the classes you’re

proposing? In the field of design, subjects

could relate to processes or to what a pupil

is designing at the moment. What role does

time play within the product or experi-

ence? How long should an object last? This

is already happening in medicine, where

chronobiological therapy considers how

time affects the instant at which a treat-

ment should be given. A patient perceives

less thermal pain in the morning than in

the afternoon, and the amount of media-

tion used for oncological hormone therapy

can be reduced when it’s given at the right

time. It’s important to remember that time

is a social construct developed by all of us

together. It’s a system that can change if we

start to rethink it collectively.

How would you do this in an ideal world?

My long-term goal is to set up a time

institute that combines different disciplines:

from chronobiology and sociology to

psychology and physics. Members would

discuss time in depth, its relationship to our

lives, and the possibility of restructuring

time together, as a society. – WG

helgaschmid.com

FUTURE OF LEARNING

Nº 2

A Question

of Time

Helga Schmid advocates an EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM

that adapts to a child’s bodily rhythms.

Helga, tell us about your approach to The
Challenge. HELGA SCHMID: Rather than
designing a spatial concept, material or
object, I would like to propose an alternative
approach to our educational system – one
that radically questions the idea of ‘learning’
in current teaching practices and includes
the subject of time.

Why is this necessary? How society thinks
about time is still based on the agricultural
system, but most of us now live in an urban
setting. Where we live affects our body’s
strongest time-giver: light. When people
work outside, they become attuned to natural
light and wake up with the sun. In a city,
where people are outside for just an hour
on weekdays – and maybe three hours a day
over the weekend – the body’s chronotype
comes into play, and it may or may not match
the agricultural system. As a result, waking up
with the sun might be counterproductive at
the least, torture at the most.

What impact does this have on education?
We need to examine the existing structure,
which forces children to sit in classrooms
for 45 minutes to an hour, independent of
their chronotypes. In Germany, school starts
as early as 7.30 a.m., but it’s a fact that if
school started just one hour later, grades
would go up by one point. What’s required
is a more flexible system.

How would you make the present system

more flexible? I would start by looking

at children’s bodily rhythms. Within your

daily bodily rhythm, you have certain sleep,

transition and active phases. If you start to

listen to and understand them – and how

they work for you – learning can be more

enjoyable and effective. For example, in the

afternoon your muscle and grip strength are

best and your body temperature is higher, so

it’s a better time for physical activity. Instead

of more classes, we could introduce a second

sleep phase followed by a physical perfor-

mance phase.

Does this apply to adults, too? Absolutely.

Theoretically, we should be moving four to

five hours a day, but few of us achieve that

much mobility. We need to decide whether

we’ve become brain-based or whether we

should give our bodies the same amount

of time and attention we give to intellectual

work. That’s why I talk about unlearning,

36 THE CHALLENGE