Paul Ford gave the closing keynote at the 2012 MFA Interaction Design Festival, and published the text in a fantastic piece called 10 Timeframes. He spends most of the talk discussing units of time, using rich and provocative stories like this:

I can never remember if we are supposed to live each day as it were our last, or if it’s the first day of the rest of our lives. It’s hard to tell sometimes. We make movies about it over and over again. The Bucket List and Terms of Endearment and so on. Or even zombie movies. And the core assumption of those movies is usually that your life is kind of inconsequential up until that moment, that now you’re going to learn what really matters. Of course these movies are made by people who are totally dedicated to making films. They give up their lives and neglect their children to make movies about the value of family.

He ends up reframing the way we view our time to think more about how the things that we do affect other people’s time:

If we are going to ask people, in the form of our products, in the form of the things we make, to spend their heartbeats on us, on our ideas, how can we be sure, far more sure than we are now, that they spend those heartbeats wisely?

We have a responsibility to make sure that we create things that help others spend their time wisely. It’s a sobering thought. This is my favorite article of the week — so well written.