Faceless Watch
stuart April 20th, 2009
In recent posts we’ve been having a chat about, among other things, economic rationalism and creativity. And, as always, information design is the subject of this blog. Here’s a recent find which combines all of these topics in one succinct design. This ‘faceless watch’ was ffffound on the Geek & Hype site. Like a lot of very good design, this is ‘meta-design’: Design that refers to design, in this case, watch design. It acknowledges a typical bracelet design, yet asks a perverse question: do we need the watch part of the watch? Will the bracelet alone do the job? Superb concept. I wonder how well it works in bright daylight?
As the economic rationalist mantra goes: “time equals money”. I wonder how much designer, Hironau Tsuboi, got paid for this design. And how long did it take? It’s difficult, via fffound, and many websites for that matter, to get to the source of an image to find out, as for example in this case, who designed that? As Uriah said in a previous post, the Web definitely throws the issue of ownership up for debate. What do you think of sites like ffffound which, on the one hand, provide endless eye-candy or ‘inspiration’, and yet, on the other, pull so much creative work free of its cultural and personal, authorial anchors? Faceless indeed.
Tags: design thinking, digital, information, numbers, time, watch
April 21st, 2009 at 12:36 am
This is where context becomes really important, also content, and yes, authenticity!! The difficulty is of course, how can this be established? Does this go into the murky water of censorship and ethics?
April 21st, 2009 at 11:58 pm
“…pull so much creative work free of its cultural and personal, authorial anchors?” Maybe it’s this I most enjoy, it’s so loose. In particular with ffffound, the visual information is the authority. The site deals with the visual information, sometimes poorly, but tries to match similar colours, similar type, similar sizes, photographs with other photographs(a qualitative approach). The finders are celebrated, they have their own stream not the designers, or authors.
Without these finders would have found this watch? Or would it have been lost into the void in the Web. Ethically, should finders be more personal responsible to credit original ownership?
June 9th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Ethically yes, but the difficulty of course is enormous given the exponential growth of the Net. Is ethics something that should be examined, and if so, how?