A logical alternative to display time, under the guidance of Prof. Sabine Wald: this lineal 24-hour dial that doesn’t show time in an endless motion like a round dial but “cut” it into days. It defines a begin and an end, thus easier to see how the day progresses: By mid of day the hour-hand appears in the middle, by evening it appears near the end. With some time to get used to, this will appear more instinctive than the traditional round dial. Above displayed time is 9:40. (Jan 2005)
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A closer look at various display methods of time:
The most commonly used one is a 12-hour round dial, which indicates time using angles, a similar type to the 24-hour round dial, which is mainly used by pilots and scientists. While the idea of the 24-hour round dial clearly came from sundial, this kind of natural relation no more exist with the 12-hour version. This makes time display on a 12-hour round dial losing reference. With 6 a.m. pointing at the bottom doesn’t make any sense.
There also have been several historical methods. The oldest one of them is the sundial mentioned above, which is very natural, though limited only to out-door use on sunny days. Water clock and sand glass use increase / decrease of certain substance by controlled flow to measure time. The German idiom “die Zeit ist abgelaufen (time has ran out)” attributes to the former one. Burning candles and incense sticks were also used to measure time. Despite of spends and inaccuracy, most of these methods (except some variants of water clock) show very intuitive information.
The numerical display, unlike all these above, is not a visual implication but a code. It has to be processed and stored as (spoken) words. An evidence for this is, when being asked by my German colleagues for my seldom used mobile phone home zone number, I came up first with Chinese in mind though I speak fluently German. It reveals that my output is not based on reading from a visual signal but on a stored verbal/audio signal. In this case it’s in Chinese since it’s more natural to me. For the more often used mobile phone mobile number, this info is then overwritten in German. Though words are good for the communication with other people, they are not instinctive enough; where ever possible, we tend to replace them with visual signals. So do I remember the password of my bank card as a graphical pattern according to the numpad layout. With these said, the numerical display is not intuitive. And another minus point about numerical esp. digital numerical display is, they don’t feel real.
Some alternative time display methods are around for a while now. Disappointedly, most of them are just ridiculous. One have to study them first in order to read the time. One example here is the binary watch.