Meccanico - The World’s first Analog Digital Mechanical watch
If there is one brand that tries to raise the bar every year at Baselworld, it’s de Grisogono. Rather than revisit or reinterpret existing construction methods and principles in mechanical watchmaking, dG tries to do something new. This year, they have out done themselves with the Meccanico dG which is a complex mechanical watch which tells time both in Analog and Digital manner. The handwound watch comprises of 651 components
The Meccanico Watch
The time information is displayed by an array of 23 horizontally and vertically positioned microsegments. Vertical segments are 9 mm high and weigh at most 25 milligrams while the horizontal segments measure 2.90 mm in length and weigh only 10 milligrams. The segments have four faces: two opposing visible faces fitted with colored strips and two opposing unmarked faces. Time changes are effected by 90° rotations of the required segment or segments. Involving one to twelve segments, time changes are lightning fast.
The side of the case
The side of the case
The back of the case
The Strap
The Buckle
The Otturatore
That’s not all, dG also introduced the Otturatore. A wristwatch with a rotating face that reveals a hidden display of seconds, date, moon phasea and power reserve at every 90 degree turn.
Cone Clock is an interesting student project where instead of a typical clock that consists of a box with a graphical time scale at the front, the clock is reduced to only an hour hand, and any flatsurface becomes the face. According to the project designer, the clock is meant to be personal and subjective.
You’re waiting for your next train connection and you’ve got a good thirty minutes left. You’re bored and you don’t know what to do. Enter ‘City Info in Time’, a trainstation infosystem that gives you suggestions about what you can do at your current stop when you have limited time.
Not a day goes by without another watch advertisement hammering in the notion that it tell us more than just time Yet, despite that, it has remained fairly conservative, maintaining its age old status quo as a symbol of prestige and personality.
Enter London based Designer Crispin Jones, who set out to investigate the cultural messages that the watch espouses - If the watch really is the purveyor of personality, could it be more than just a status symbol? Could it instead express some of the negative aspects of a wearer’s personality? Could it even change it?
With some help from fellow designers, He developed seven working concept watches - three of which focused on subverting the personality i.e. Summissus (Video) - A watch that fosters humility in the wearer by constantly reminding him or her of their demise, Adsiduus (Video) - uses the psychological practice of auto-suggestion to affect a change in the wearer’s personality i.e. “You’re an amazing person!”, and Fallax (Video) - a watch that projects the wearer’s honesty instead of their wealth and style.
While the remaining four focused on how to tell time differently: Docilis (Video) - It would train the wearer to live without a watch by internalizing it using a small electric shock at regular intervals, Avidus ( Video) - that would make time personal, by making it pass more quickly or slowly depending on the wearer’s mood, Prudens (Video) - enabled the wearer to check the time without looking at their watch, and Inveteratus (Video) - A watch that referred to a more culturally appropriate timescale than the movement of the sun to tell time - the television schedule.
London based Sennep have created an interactive dandelion clock installation that allows users to use a real electric hair dryer to blow away the seeds of a dandelion. Blowing it apart is a popular past-time for children and the number of blows required to completely rid the clock of its seeds is deemed by many to be the time of day. Mind you, this isn’t really a real clock, but I found the concept intriguing enough.
Loop’s Rachel Wingfield and Mathias Gmachl have created a personalised alarm clock that is integrated into your bedding. Drawing inspiration from how light has controlled our body clock by telling us when to sleep and when to wake, the duo have created a pillow and duvet that simulate a natural dawn that ease you into your day by using electroluminescent technology to turn the textile surface into a reactive light source.
Apart from the novelty of, the clock is also supposed to treat sufferers of seasonal affective disorder (SAD) where insufficient levels of daylight cause medical conditions caused by a hormonal imbalance ranging from depression to loss of energy, pre-menstrual syndrome, weight gain and migraines.
Seiko Instruments, a division of Seiko, has developed a prototype watch (and a decent looking one at that) which connects to the mobile phone via Bluetooth. Codenamed CPC TR-006, the watch displays information from your cell phone that would otherwise require the person to reach in his or her pocket i.e. network signal strength, battery condition.
The watch also alerts you whenever your cellphone receives a call, an SMS or e-mail messages by vibrating or playing a preset ringtone. It also has caller ID, so all you need to do is glance at your wrist and you can see who is calling or who sent you a message.
In addition, you may adjust your cellphone’s ringtone volume through the watch’s interface. The watch is scheduled to be released by late 2006 / early 2007.
Jumping Jack Flash is a prototype watch by an award winning Design firm, Xefirostarch, that compresses time in terms of technology by utilizing the most essential condition of tracking - movement and displacement. The metronome arm, a reinvention of the hourglass, combines physical movement with digital display and marks the passing of time through its hourly rotation and the reconfiguration of the interior component or bubbles. The time of the day appears as a luminescent projection on on the interior face of the arm, through the LED display wired into the bubbles. Multiple simultaneous scalar conditions of movement produce the effect of a hybridized digital-mechanical environment.
Put together a nationwide competition where you ask emerging innovators to depict the future of seamless mobility, and you are bound to have a scenario or two where the wristwatch retains its mantle as the interface of choice. Take the MOTOFWRD competition for example, one of their finalist enteries involves a swiss army equivalent gadget that combines your phone, GPS system, credit card and pda into one special inteface that combines a specially-equipped glasses and a wristwatch. (Read in Detail (PDF))
