Industrial civilisation is based on accurate time-keeping, and the most efficient workplaces now rely on "just in time" deliveries. The problem is that real life becomes a perpetual struggle to keep on schedule, in spite of late-running trains, accidents, and all the other things that can go wrong. However, given a mobile phone, smart watch or other form of continuous communication, we can move from fixed time to fluidtime, and from rigid schedules to "progressive co-ordination".

"The mobile phone changes fixed times into flows," says Michael Kieslinger. "We're moving away from clock time to a more fluid kind of time."

A common example: two friends agree to meet in the city centre. They could fix a time days or weeks beforehand. Or they could have a general time in mind - around nineish - but change the final time and place several times according to how their days are going. This may well involve making lots of phone calls that begin: "I'm on a train..."

Kieslinger, who was born in Austria, came up with the idea of fluidtime while working on his master's thesis at the Royal College of Art in London. He's continuing his research as an associate professor at the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy. Earlier this month, he took part in a joint presentation at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, California.

Micro-coordination is not just for meetings. Kieslinger thinks people should be able to get real time information about everything from the movement of buses to when the communal washing machine is about to finish its next cycle. Both these applications are already in use at the institute. Turin buses radio in their positions to a control centre and Kieslinger's team taps into that, while a Wash&Turn display tells students and teachers what the washing machine is up to. Both Java applets can be downloaded from the Fluidtime website (link below).

Take the idea further and you can imagine fluidtime servers in law courts, GP surgeries, couriers and transportation companies, theatres and many other places, all making information available on the net. Anything of wide interest could be broadcast to portable devices such as the Microsoft Spot (smart personal object technology) watches already on sale in the US.

A universal fluidtime system would not remove all waiting time, but it would reduce the stress that waiting produces. It would also, Kieslinger argues, enable people to make better use of their time.

At the moment, for example, delivery firms can propose delivering something to your home between 10am and 6pm, and expect you to wait. In an age when drivers could not be contacted once they left the depot, that might have made sense. Now that a vehicle's position can be identified by GPS satellite positioning, and mobile phones and PCs are common, it's just incompetent.

It is ironic that deliverymen, who are almost certainly using fluidtime concepts to organise their leisure activities, are being forced to provide a much inferior service when they are at work.

Fluidtime website
www.fluidtime.net
Fluidtime: Timing Tools
http://conferences.oreillynet.com
O'Reilly presentation slides [PDF]
http://conferences.oreillynet.com