Research : What is a timepiece?

Task:

A time piece is a clock or watch for measuring time. 

The task is to design a timepiece that is both creative and visually impressive. This can take many forms, from wrist watches, pocket watches and ring watches to huge architectural clock towers and all points in-between.

A timepieces' workings are not necessarily based on a clockwork mechanism with cogs, springs and pendulums. You should consider other forms of energy that can be harnessed to measure time, such as water clocks, hourglasses, sundials and even potato clocks!

In order to design a timepiece, I first have to define what time is. I believe that time is a human concept. It is the measurement of the duration between two events. There are countless definitions coming from religious and philosophical points of view, but I think I want to focus on the fact that it's just a human made concept. I think Immanuel Kant's definition best represents my thoughts.

Kant thought of time as a fundamental part of an abstract conceptual framework, together with space and number, within which we sequence events, quantify their duration, and compare the motions of objects. In this view, time does not refer to any kind of entity that "flows," that objects "move through," or that is a "container" for events. Spatial measurements are used to quantify the extent of and distances between objects, and temporal measurements are used to quantify the durations of and between events. Time was designated by Kant as the purest possible schema of a pure concept or category.

I also want to play around with the idea that there is no sensory organ for telling time unlike taste or sound, etc. We have internal body clocks but they're never as precise as how we want them to be. Everyone has alarms and watches to avoid being late. What if the clock is designed to work with an individual's subjective time perception? How about when we sleep? We lose all sense of time when we're not conscious. 

Below is a rough mindmap of some concepts that I have so far.

Wikipedia, (2015). Time. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time [Accessed 9 Oct. 2015].