Arts & Culture
Clock-watching
Published 07 February 2000
Design - Designer watches do everything but tell us we're late
In the land of the watchmaker, it's always nine minutes past ten. Advertisements for timepieces are unanimous in positioning the hands on their faces just like those of a happy camper doing morning stretching exercises - just like that symbol for a leisure centre, in fact.
What is the meaning of this horological Mexican wave? Perhaps the hands are raised in celebration of the rout of the digital watch. It seemed for a while in the 1970s that we would spend our future reading off numbers rather than telling the time in the old-fashioned way. But that's not how it turned out. Digits may rule on alarm clocks, video recorders and station platforms, all locations where they are doubtless valued for their spurious implication of precision and urgency. But most of us quickly saw that they were unsuitable as an adornment to the wrist.
It is not technology but design that has transformed the watch from an item of jewellery to something quite different. Today they are sold like trainers. Prices have tumbled. Brand names are important as never before: not Rolex and Cartier, but Calvin Klein and Paul Smith, Nike and Timberland. Many designers who have put their names to perfumes and sunglasses now do watches, too. Specialist retailers are springing up that sell nothing but watches, presented not in glass cabinets but in ranks grouped according to these brands.
They have their work cut out for them. A watch used to be for life, or at least for retirement. Now we appear to buy watches in excessive numbers - 15 million are sold every year, an average of one every three years for each of us. But the value of the market is almost static. We buy more watches, but they cost ever less. It's all the fault of Swatch, the Swiss manufacturer that, 20 years ago, dared to say that time is not precious.
The genius of Swatch was to use flexible, robotic assembly lines to introduce regular but trivial variations in design, without adding to its manufacturing costs. Face designs and strap colours were co-ordinated into spring and autumn "collections". Today, the emphasis is shifting from graphic design to industrial design. For some of the top brands - Casio's chunky G-Shock, Pulsar's Spoon and Opex (a new brand for women) - the novelty is mainly in the shape of the watch-case. Technology is finding its way back into watches - although, this time, the familiar analogue watch face is likely to be retained. Casio has launched models that incorporate digital cameras and MP3 digital music facilities. Many will incorporate wrist-phones. It is ironic, however, that cachet is conferred by size in watches, while an impractical minimalism is preferred in the mobile phones with which they are converging. But then, watchmakers displayed their talents in this direction almost a century ago, when the Cartier Tank watch glorified the possibilities of miniaturisation. Intrigued by the contradictory cohabitation of analogue and digital, Sam Hecht of the London design company IDEO created a watch for Seiko that receives messages in digital form like a pager but tells you so by analogue means (a flag in a window on the face changes colour).
For all this, these are still essentially watches in the jewellery tradition. Coming from outside the industry, Nike may be on to something different. Nike Sport Timing launched its first models in 1998. Its conceit is that they are runners' watches. With its foundation in discussions with athletes, the resulting design was radical - an S-shaped curve that wraps round without a strap and doesn't chafe against the bony bits of your wrist (if you actually run, that is). Like the watch in John Tenniel's drawing of the White Rabbit, the numbers on the face are exaggerated in size so that they can be read while rushing along. The function buttons are also large, making it clearer what they do. It may prove significant that Nike's developments, conceived for the athletic and fashion-conscious, demonstrate the ideals of "universal design" - the belief that design improvements introduced for specific groups of users, such as the disabled, should make a product better for all, rather than stigmatised as obviously and exclusively for that group.
Sports remain a favoured theme in the rush to find new things for watches to do. IDEO has designed a skier's watch that can tell you your altitude, what the weather is like and how fast you are falling. Soon it will be able to tell you where you are, with Global Positioning System electronics picking up satellite data, and how you are by monitoring body functions.
But wait a second. Who are we kidding with all this precision and performance? This is not how we really perceive time. A watch tells only two times: too late and not yet. Nothing about their design reflects this truth. It's a pretence that time is divided into hours, minutes and seconds, and that each arrangement of a watch's hands - even nine minutes past ten - is equally significant. Albert Einstein understood this. "When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder, a second seems like an hour. That's relativity," he once remarked, and he nearly became a watchmaker.
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