TIMELY DESIGNS

Watchmaking has a difficult relationship with design. All too often good wristwatch design ideas make for unworkable creations. Nevertheless, industrial designers are having a go at offering alternative visions of watchmaking - some of these might yet become icons

- Joshua Sims

" I think what works about a collaboration like this is that it allows the watch brand to really go officially off-piste with its design," says Tej Chauhan, the industrial designer behind everything from cutlery to hair-dryers, and one of five selected to produce their take on Rado's True Square watch. "And I wanted a design that made people say 'f*** me, what's that?!', to pay attention and get talking.

There wasn't any point if the resulting watch wasn't different. It would just be another watch otherwise." That certainly cannot be said for Chauhan's design, with its 1960s sci-fi inflections and, most strikingly of all, the fact that the case and padded leather strap are in a brighter shade of yellow. That almost did not come off- up to the wire it looked as though Rado's engineers just could not make that bold shade without imperfections. But the result? The brand's ecomm best-seller in the US - it is also reportedly the most popular of this series in Singapore. "Maybe that makes for room for Rado to do other watches in a similar vein," says Chauhan.

It is the kind of collaborative success that - measured in excitement, if nothing else - has echoes back through watchmaking history over the second half of the 20th century and beyond. Many of the most innovative and/ or memorable watches have been the result of work not by watch designers who have only ever designed watches sometimes having worked their way up through the echelons of a single company - but of industrial designers versed in applying processes of ideation and a broad appreciation of materials and function turning their consideration to what a watch could be, aesthetically and functionally. Many of their new ideas would be borrowed by the more conventional, historical industry at large. Many of the watches would be called icons.