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