Dashing Good Looks

Just seeing isn’t believing when it comes to the TAG Heuer Autavia Calibre Heuer 02, a watch that began as a dashboard instrument. There isn’t even enough space in one story to get all the details, so we come back for a second serving.

- Ashok Soman

Design is perhaps the most demanding of task masters, if one could characterise design as a taskmaster. Even if the design of an item performs its proper function and is pleasing to the eye, it may fail to find purchase with its intended audience. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, design how a thing works, and if function and form are not in wedded bliss, well, it doesn’t work. Inconveniently, if the audience doesn’t feel like using it as it has been designed, it has also failed – think here of the original smartphones, which operated with the aid of a stylus and were effectively laughed out of town. As far as watches go, design is a demon that cannot be seen, though it hides in plain sight. The makers of various so-called smartwatches are discovering this because they have the technology and the know-how but not the design chops to make something people want to wear and use. Just think for a moment to Philippe Dufour inviting his customers to put on a wrist-clock in the form of the Grande sonnerie. It was a mad endeavour but he succeeded, mainly because he got the design just right. He later proved his mastery with the simplicity, a watch that is beautiful through and through as well as a pleasure to wear (or so we are given to understand).

While it is not said in so many words in the watchmaking world, Dufour's success is a matter of good design, in the sense that Steve Jobs meant. Just scan the pages of any watch brand’s catalogues and you will see plenty of examples where the design just didn’t make it.

CHALLENGING DNA