International Herald Tribune
The Guardian Unlimited
Promotional Products Business Magazine
Thursday, April 15, 2004
Trip the Light Fantastic, a wristwatch made by the Japanese company Pimp, has no numbers, index marks or hands. To tell the time, the wearer must decode the red, yellow and green light emitting diode lamps that flash, disco-like, then freeze into a bar-graph pattern on the watch's oversized rectangular face. (Yes, instructions are included).
"You don't want to be reading the time while driving," observed Brent Car, a Pimp wearer and owner of Tokyoflash, the company with the exclusive worldwide distribution rights to Pimp's Trip — 500 of the $149 watches sold out after two months on the market — and similarly radical watches produced by young Japanese designers like EleeNo who makes only handless watches.
Meet the sons of Swatch. The Swiss powerhouse, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last year, pioneered the offbeat, inexpensive timepiece, and opened up the market for what is now known as the fashion watch. But with big companies like Fossil, Diesel and Guess now in the mix, the fashion watch, once a hip signifier, has become a mass market, shopping mall staple.
So a host of small retailers and specialty distributors like Japan's Tokyoflash are aiming at consumers who want to display their design savoir-faire by hanging something thought-provoking on their wrist.
But don't mention the S word to any of these watch sellers and retailers. "Swatch and Fossil are nice, but they basically have only one design each," said Car. "There is so much more that can be done with watches."
.
Charles Coster, the designer and owner of Time by Design, added: "Swatch did watches as fashion. We do watches as design."
In the world of radical watch design, where most items retail under $200, the prestige of wearing a particular model doesn't follow price, but something less tangible: taste, awareness, sophistication.
"We're marketing to design-savvy people, people that 'Get it,"' said Adrian Olabuenaga, owner of Acme, a company that invites celebrated architects like Michael Graves and product designers like Karim Rashid to create limited edition design watches, pens and desk accessories. (Acme products are sold not in watch or jewelry stores, but in museum shops like New York City's Museum of Modern Art.)
The winning concept driving the popularity of a watch can be everything from a designer who is famous (preferably only among the cognoscenti), to a mechanism that is over-the-top bizarre.
Take the Tokyoflash bestseller, the OVO Decision Maker. It is equipped with L.E.D. displays that can point you in the right direction or help you make decisions, like a battery-powered Ouija Board. While it straightens out your life, according to the product catalogue, "the numbers blur, shake across the screen, go up and down like waves."
Almost like an afterthought, the OVO does tell the time. But that function may not be such a big deal for the consumer in this market.
"Today you don't need the watch to tell time — the time is everywhere you look, on your cellphone, your PDA, your computer," said Daniel Jakobsson, 32, a designer and brand manager at Axcent of Scandinavia, a Stockholm-based specialty brand owned by the Swedish watchmaker Klockgrossisten i Norden AB, which has distribution in 47 countries.
Although owned by a large company, Axcent of Scandinavia carved a reputation as an arty, boutique brand in 1996 by inviting graduates and students of Sweden's National College of Arts, Crafts and Design to create its designs.
In other words, the watch as timepiece may be a redundant idea, so it's time to look for other reasons to wear it.
For Jonas Bergfeldt, a member of Sweden's No Picnic industrial design collective, the wristwatch is a metaphor that expresses our modern relationship with time. The sleek, lozenge-shaped bezel face of Frost, Bergfeldt's design for Axcent of Scandinavia, is made of an opaque glass that makes it difficult to read the hands underneath.
"We were fed up, irritated by time and deadlines," he explained. "We wanted to make a comment that time is not so important, please don't think about it so much. And also to say that time is a luxury, and you can afford to see it not so sharply on your watch."
"We're a niche market," said Coster, who together with his wife runs the Time by Design company from his homes in Florida and Massachusetts. He said they sell 5,000 to 10,000 watches a year via the Internet and newspaper advertisements.
Coster's watches, with their clean, half-moon-shaped stainless steel faces and leather bands, seem rather conservative at first glance, until you look at the liquid crystal display elements in the face, which express the passage of time in unexpected visual ways, using pie-shaped or moon-shaped segments in continuous motion.
Reading time on his watches can be a challenge, he admitted, but also a revelation. "Seeing time in a different way, discovering what time is," he said.
Coster said his customers include architects, graphic designers, and middle-aged yuppies. "We even got a call from Mongolia once," he added.
Axcent of Scandinavia's sales this year, according to Jakobsson, have been soaring, even in a sluggish Swedish economy. "The average Italian man has seven watches, but the average Swedish guy has one watch for seven years. We're trying to change that," he said.
But there's a Catch 22, of course, in the world of the novelty designer watch. Sell too many, and you risk losing the very customers who put you in business.
In Japan's radical watch scene, designers get around that problem by speeding up the desire cycle, creating limited editions that sell out in three to six months, to be replaced by the next generation of OVOs or Pimps (those who missed out on Trip the Light Fantastic can add themselves to Tokyoflash's waiting list for the soon-to-be-released sequel, which has all blue L.E.D. lights).
Acme's Olabuenaga isn't planning such a fast turnover, but he has been encouraging his watch designers to stretch.
"When we started out, I think we were more conservative with the designs, because we figured that the factories wouldn't be able to produce strange shapes and forms. So most of our designer watches were rather two-dimensional, graphically interesting but not innovative in form," he said.
But he added that enlightenment emerged after a trip to a factory in Shenzen where nearly all of this market's offbeat watches are produced.
"The guys there showed us the Pimp watches, which are made there, and others. And we realized for the first time that these guys in China could do anything, make anything," he said.
"So now we're telling our designers, in our brief, to go further, go crazy. Give us new shapes, new ideas, new materials. New! New! New!"
Daisann McLane is a writer based in New York.
Emotion about Design - From Guardian Unlimited - March 2004
Don Norman changed the way a generation of designers saw the world, and this had an impact on many of the things you have in your home. Thanks to Norman, at least a few of them - including Apple's Macintosh - became more usable. Now he's hoping to repeat his success, but with a difference. Before, he was a sort of Nasty Norman, the academic who told you why your product was bad. Now he's become Nice Norman, who smiles and tells you how great everything is.
"That was the old Don Norman," he says. "This is my new life. I'm trying really hard to be positive about things."
It's quite a turnaround, but like the rest of his work, it's based on everyday experience. His ground-breaking book, The Psychology of Everyday Things, published in 1988, was a paean to usability, but it did not stop him from buying and liking products that didn't meet his own strictures.
"Our house is littered with things that don't work too well," he confesses, "but I wanted them anyway."
The sequel, Emotional Design, is based on the idea that there are three levels at play in design: visceral, behavioural, and reflective. It's still true that, on a rational level, products should be functional, but now he explains why they should be beautiful and have an emotional impact as well.
"I want products that are a joy to behold and a pleasure to use," he says. "We now know how to make products that work fine; how do we make products that make you smile?"
The fun side made numerous appearances during my long talk with Norman on one of his rare visits to the UK from his base in Silicon Valley, California. To illustrate a point, he'd take out a watch or a pen, hand it over, and wait for a smile, or even a wow. Time by Design's Pie watch, for example, has no hands, so before you can tell the time, you have to figure out how it works. Norman readily admits that it's harder to read than a conventional, user-centred design, but for him, "the reflective value [of the Pie watch] outweighs the behavioural difficulties". He loves it.
"Visceral design is what nature does," says Norman, and he reckons it's "biologically prewired". Visceral design is about how things look, feel and sound - the world of blue skies and apple pie. One of Norman's examples of visceral design is the 1961 E-type Jaguar: it's the kind of car people fall in love with and want to own. How well it works, and how much it costs, are afterthoughts. Some people will buy a bottle of Perrier water for the visceral design of the bottle, even if it costs more than similar water in a crude but functional plastic bottle. Putting iMacs in colourful plastic cases is another example of visceral design.
"Behavioural design is all about use," says Norman. "Appearance really doesn't matter: performance does." This is the area where The Design of Everyday Things was a huge success. Behavioural design is about getting products to function well, and about making that functionality easily accessible - an area where technology products often fall down. Some things are complicated, so users may still have to learn how something works. However, they should only have to learn it once, he says.
"Reflective design is about the meaning of things," says Norman. "It's about message: what does using this product say about you? It's where your self-image is. It depends on your age, background, culture." The reflective level is where things like brand image and marketing come into play, selling products not on their functionality but on things like prestige and exclusivity. Reflective design about creating things you want to show off to your friends. An example, on the cover of Emotional Design, is Philippe Starck's Juicy Salif, about which the designer reportedly said: "My juicer is not meant to squeeze lemons, it is meant to start conversations." Norman says he has one, "but I don't use it for squeezing lemons".
Visceral appeal is fast, sometimes instant, and most products have it to some degree. (Things that don't obviously have it are known as "acquired tastes".) Behavioural design is useful, if not essential: there is a market for clocks that make it really hard to tell the time but, outside design museum shops, it is not a large one. Reflective design is often a part of people's long-term relationship with a product - do they love it or hate it? - and can be enhanced by brand marketing and cultural conditioning.
"Branding is pure reflection," says Norman. To reduce things to basics, the visceral is what something looks like, the behavioural is how it works, and the reflective is what it means to you. And every product works on all three levels, whether the designer has thought about it or not. In Emotional Design, Norman quotes Del Coates's book, Watches Tell More Than Time, where he explains that "it is impossible to design a watch that tells only time. Knowing nothing more, the design of a watch alone - or of any other product - can suggest assumptions about the age, gender, and outlook of the person who wears it".
In other words, there is no escape. Wearing a cheap, functional watch sends a different message from wearing an expensive, but fashionable, model, regardless of how well it tells the time. In the same way, Norman's "smart casual" open-necked shirt and pullover send the message that he's a designer rather than an accountant, while the fact that he's still immaculately turned out shows that it's not accidental. They're the kind of assessments we all make, but Norman brings them to the surface. (He likes the folk tale about fish being the last to notice water.)
Norman points out that reflective design becomes more important as products mature. In the early days, it may be a struggle to get something to work well - the first cars, and the first computers, were examples. But when you can take functionality for granted, how do you choose between different products? You choose the ones with emotional appeal, the ones you can fall in love with, the ones that say more about you than cash ever can. "Reflective design is where companies live or die," says Norman.
Reflective design reflects the real world. "Look around at the wide variety of things you can buy - chairs, for example. Different people have different homes and different tastes and different chairs for different uses," says Norman. "That's a good thing: it makes life richer." Negative Norman might have criticised their usability drawbacks, but Mr Positive is more concerned with appreciating what each one offers.
Norman hopes the new approach will lead to something of a career shift. For the past 20 years, he has been closely associated with personal computing and the web, having been a "User Experience Architect" and fellow at Apple Computer in California, and co-founder with Jakob Nielsen of the web usability company, Nielsen Norman Group. (He's also professor of computer science, psychology and cognitive science at Northwestern University in Chicago.) "I'm trying to move the Nielsen Norman group towards product design," he says, "and I also want to expand the focus on usability to include things that are enjoyable." The new book is taking him in that direction.
Norman thinks the things that now need attention are not so much computers but "the interior of the automobile, the cell phone, and home theatre. They're all becoming complicated and unusable." He's also exploring the coming age of robotics and, to some people's discomfort, the latest book ends with a long exploration of emotional machines and robots, including teaching machines.
But, sad to say - and I had to ask - "no, there's nothing about doorknobs" in Emotional Design. As people who have read it will know, The Design of Everyday Things changed the way many of us saw door knobs and handles, and how you decided which side of the door to push or pull. That was just one of the ways the book encouraged people to think about design, but it was the most memorable one. "I'm a scientist and it took me a while to get over being famous for bad door handles," says Norman. "I now think it's nice that it changed so many people's lives. I don't know whether Emotional Design will have the same impact. All I can say is, 'I hope so'."
· Emotional Design is published by Basic Books
From Promotional Products Business Magazine - September 2004
Time By Design
Forget the big hand and the little hand. And, digital readouts are out. In cyberspace, time is art. At least it is for the folks at Time By Design, based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, when it comes to their Cyberclocks, artistically designed software clocks for the personal computer.
What are Cyberclocks? More than clocks on the Internet, they are “a new way to tell time,” says Owner Mary Coster. “They are clocks in that you can read the time, and they are on the Internet. But they are also works of art.”
Starting out as designers of very innovative wristwatches (see the Time By Design Web site at www.timebydesign.com), Coster and her cohorts developed similarly inventive Web-based clocks to use as advertising for the company’s watch business. “As we began to do more on line, we realized a lot more could be added to a computer clock than any other framework,” she says. The “more” of which she speaks consists of color, sound and photographs. But the art part comes in the way these timepieces are constructed.
Where Coster calls them clocks, they are actually more like time-telling riddles. For example, on the company Web site at www.cyberclocks.com, there are several working samples. A quick glance to see if you’re running late for your dinner date won’t do. Instead, Cyberclocks require study and reflection—at least at first. Once you’ve cracked the code, however, you’re free to enjoy their beauty.
“Learning new and alternative ways of telling time can act as an impetus for us to be more mindful of it,” Coster believes. “Our clocks can serve as conversation pieces and are definitely entertaining.”
Cyberclocks are widely customizable with customers supplying elements of their own designs or Coster’s team making one for you. Examples of the company’s works are shown on page 134. “The design we created for the Charter High School For Architecture & Design (CHAD), in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, incorporated features of the school’s logo into the clock along with a chiming sound,” she says. “It also includes buttons that connect the user to the CHAD Web site.”
Recipients receive the custom Web-based clocks by Web link or CD with instructions for downloading. They can run on both MAC and PC platforms and occupy five megs of free disk space. To operate, computer systems will require Flash player. The clocks can be used as screen savers or open on the computer desktop.
“Cyberclocks help companies brand themselves because they can incorporate a name, message and original idea into the clock,” Coster believes. “This product allows for limitless creativity.” These Cyberclocks created for the Chater High School For Architecture and Design (CHAD) and Westbrook Technologies, Inc. took elements of the organizations’ logos into consideration. Can you tell what time it is? On the CHAD clock it is 11:48:45 and on the Westbrook clock, it is 4:12:50
To reach Cyberclocks, call 413-528-1821 or e-mail info@TimeByDesign.com. —C.G.