Where did the idea for the project come from in the first place?
I found the LED displays that were used in two of the watches in a junk shop in Italy. I thought they were amazingly beautiful and the size of them obviously suggested making a watch with them. The displays are from around 1980 and I imagine were probably not visible in their original incarnation (I suspect they were used in calculators or panel displays) so I wanted to make something that would show them off. This started me thinking about watches and I wanted to make a series of them. An additional impetus for the project came after meeting Ross Cooper who had made a fantastic visual clock. Ross ended up collaborating on the design of some of the watches in the series.

Why watches?
I’m interested in making things with a critical design approach. I also work a lot with technology (I graduated from the computer related design course at the RCA in 2000). I was interested in watches as they are really one of the earliest forms of technology that we still make regular use of. The analog watch display is interesting because it still has this direct link back to the sundial (so of course in an ecstasy of design arrogance we thought why not redesign it?). Watches have managed to transcend pure function to become carriers of additional levels of meaning (status etc.), but the additional messages are fairly prosaic (I’m rich!).

How did you decide which themes to develop? How many themes do you think you rejected in the process?
At its height there were ten watches in the series, the ones that were rejected tended to be those that really didn’t fit in with the series as a whole (eg there was one that had used 360 degree audio to communicate the time to you
sonically, which we didn’t feel fitted in with the overall themes, although it was a nice idea).

Another was for a pair of watches that told the time since you had last met, again a nice idea, but not really complimenting the series. The things that interest me are designs that take into account the people around you or objects that are designed to alter people’s behaviour (like the fortune telling table I made that tries to burn your fingers whilst it gives its answer), so ones that fitted these agenda survived. Also ideas like the watch that tells the time based on the TV schedule were simply too good to reject.

Please briefly explain the watches we’re showing.
Ok here goes:
Fallax (images one and two) is a watch which seeks to communicate the wearer’s honesty. The watch contains a lie detector and when a lie is detected the display flashes the word ‘lies’.

Adsiduus (images three and four) is a pair of watches which seek to either undermine or enhance the wearer’s confidence. The time is displayed along with either negative or positive mantras. The drip-drip of this over time brings about a change in bearing.

Docilis (image five) is a watch without a face. Instead of displaying the time constantly it delivers a small electric shock to the wrist at 15 minutes intervals. In this way the wearer gradually learns to internalise the time and no longer needs to wear a watch.

Avidus (images six to eight) is an attempt to make a watch which reflects the way we feel time passing at different rates depending on our moods / circumstances. To tell the time you touch two contacts on the watch. These contacts take a reading of the wearer’s stress level and the time is displayed faster or slower depending on the reading.

Which watch do you think was most successful?
Adsiduus is interesting because, whilst I don’t especially believe in the notion of mantras / auto-suggestion, on the day I was writing and revising the texts for the negative mantras I found myself feeling worse and worse. This was presently offset when I came to set down the positive mantras! Curiously it was incredibly easy to write the 30 negative statements, but quite laborious to write 30 short, positive mantras. I also like Avidus because it is quite interactive and
interesting to try and find different areas of skin to make it run at
different speeds. It’s also quite interesting to get different people to try it to see what their stress level is like.

Who do you think would wear one of these watches? Were you ever concerned people would dismiss them as simple gimmicks?
In a way I’m not really concerned with the watches as actual products. The watches are in a large part provocations for how different a watch might be and what different messages it might carry (also to highlight and make visible the different ways that we already ‘read’ watches). I would really like to see some of them in production, but this would be a bonus rather than the primary intention of the project. For me digital technology offers a fantastic scope for a plurality of approach, I would really like to see a kind of couture model adopted for electronic product design...

You collaborated with some members of IDEO on the project. How did that come about?
It was unofficial — basically me making use of the skills of two friends who work there, Anton Schubert and Graham Pullin. Anton was really fantastic in working with me on the design and the model making of the cases for the watches — he is head of prototyping at IDEO London (although I did all the electronic prototyping). It was his input that led to us using antler for the bodies of two of the watches — it made it something out of the ordinary from his normal working practice, so there was some interest for him. I have to say that IDEO were enormously tolerant of me coming in at the end of the day and using Anton and their workshop.