Kickstarter is a place where people go for help in bringing
their ideas into reality. Some of those ideas are simple and elegant, others
are more controversial. Fredrik Colting’s kickstarter campaign might be one of
the most controversial I have seen. He has created a product he has called
Tikker. Tikker is a watch that does more than just tell time. Its main function
is to count down the number of years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds
until you die.
A
person would first use the Tikker handbook and answer a series of questions
regarding their usual exercise activities, habits such as smoking, and other
health questions. Upon completing this questionnaire the person would end up
with the number of years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds that they
would live for. After the person subtracts the number of years, months, days,
hours, minutes and seconds that they currently have lived from this answer they
enter the values into the watch. The watch then displays the current time of
day as well as the current amount left in the time to live countdown timer.
Just
thinking about the semantics of this, I have to question how accurate a device
like this is. While I am sure that Tikker’s questions ask about current health
problems that you have I am unsure if it asks about your family’s health. As a
fair amount of problems are genetic or are more likely to occur if one of your
parents or grandparents had it, these type of questions should also be
included. However including all of these questions inside the questionnaire would
make the questionnaire quite long and possibly lead to end users becoming upset
or annoyed with the number of questions that they need to answer.
The questionnaire
also seems to rely a lot on the user to fill out the questions and then perform
all of the calculations. Should a person make a mistake in either calculating
their life expectancy or in entering this time to live into their watch, many
different problems could result. One would be that if they perform the
calculations wrong and then go to subtract their age from the result and find
out they should have already died it can cause them to freak out. Some members
of my family I know would be running around screaming if something told them
that they should have already died. The second problem I can think of is if the
clock reaches 0:00:00:0:0:0 while they are wearing it. Once again using my
family for reference they would either run around screaming, as I mentioned
earlier, or they would be calling me up, as I am the technological savvy one of
the family, saying that the watch is not working correctly and request I fix
it.
Colting
created the idea for Tikker after his father had passed away. He wanted to
create a way to help others realize that they only are alive for so long and
that they need to make the most of the time they have. While I am not faulting
Colting’s intentions for making the watch I do not think that the timer would
be the most accurate. In fact I think constantly reminding people that they
only live for so long and that they should live their life to the fullest is a
wonderful thing. However I think that he probably should have gone about doing
so in a different way.
Oi, this is oddly reminiscent of a website called "Death Clock," which did the same thing. I remember as a kid going onto this site and reluctantly entering my information, receiving some end time and quickly closing out of the page to convince myself that never happened. I have read their Kickstarter page and this may be the most gimmicky product to appear (in regards to this subject) since Death Clock. The fact that people have backed this product -- one that I am eager to judge but won't -- is beyond me. Also, I find it interesting that this inaccurate tool tries to play the role of religion, in a sense, constantly reminding its consumers to live life and embrace the repulsively popular "#YOLO."
ReplyDeleteIn short, this is nothing but a gimmick. I'm sorry his father died, but creating a cold, technological instrument to remind you to be a human is disgusting. But the question should be raised, I supposed: Do we need it?