How Buffer Icons Shape Our Sense of Time and Our Practices of Waiting

Below is an article that I wrote for Real Life magazine (original can be found HERE). This piece is from one of the chapters of the book that focuses on “designs of waiting” like buffering icons. We have an acute awareness of duration, and that awareness is always linked to prevailing technologies that shape how we understand and experience time. One such technology reshaping our sense of a moment is an otherwise unassuming little piece of interface design: the buffering icon — the circle sp...