In order to develop interactive technology that interfaces more and more with humans and their full embodiment, robotics engineers need a means for reasoning about natural and artificial movement that is rooted in human experience. Movement studies – a broad field covering somatics and choreography – can act as a bridge to allow engineers to create technology that interacts with human movement in order to serve societal needs. An interesting, perhaps unanticipated result of this process is that applying movement studies to robotics requires a sharpening of the methodology. Thus, the branch of movement studies initiated by Laban and Bartenieff – sometimes described as Laban/Bartenieff Movement Studies (LBMS) – provides an important tool set for understanding movement patterns in context. This work is organized through four established components: Body, Effort, Shape, and Space (or the BESS System). The observation and movement-based workshop described in this extended abstract will share ideas about temporal patterns in movement, explicated as a new component, Time, establishing the BESST System. This component grows from working with machines, which must deal in user-specified and designed quantitative units of time, as a way to describe motion that is not quite as fluent as human motion. Some machines do not portray clear ideas about intent and relationship from their movement, but it is typically possible to measure the amount of time an action took and frequently phrasing is observed through stops and starts of different machine parts. Thus, while a particular example of artificial movement may not rise to the level of creating a clear dynamic quality, it does use elements collected in this component of Time, e.g., sequencing, duration, tempo, and phrasing. This workshop will offer an experiential inroad to these elements and their use inside of contemporary approaches to robotics.