AN OVERRATED WATCH DESIGN HAS "ART" INSTEAD OF FUNCTION

In 1947 an American industrial designer named Nathan George Horwitt produced a watch with a black face and a single circle indicating twelve o'clock. Movado copied it a year later without authorization and ultimately settled with Horwitt for $29,000 in 1975. Museums and others foolishly swooned over the design and it is  now marketed as the "Museum  Watch." The Movado site is not working as of this writing so I provide another link for models of this watch. http://www.jomashop.com/movmussaf.html

This is a good example of  the collapse of good design standards in the face of  arty pretensions, in this case, in the face of the art cult of minimalism. It may be that the removal of detail, color, line and other indicia from a painting can add ineffable qualities. But the removal of time indications from a watch face is nothing but a detriment to what should be its main function, i.e., the telling of time. Beware of products which make themselves harder to use in the name of  "art" and "design." To paraphrase a nasty fellow from the Twentieth Century "When I hear that a product uses the slogan 'The Art of Design' I reach for my gun."

The "museum" watch is just one step away from the total invisibility of the clothing sold by those famous con men to the gullible Emperor and his court in Hans Christian Andersen's famous tale. In fact, nothing would really be lost if the twelve o'clock mark was completely removed from this piece. The user would have even more of the "pleasure" of  the extra effort needed to determine the hour and minute. The time-setting knob at three o'clock could serve just as well as the point from which other hours are located.

The latest iteration of this product adds color to the dot, and matches the color in a ring around the face and the hands. This bold move is characterized in an ad as creating "watches with a new attitude, energized by color."

I guess when you are asking a high price for a product whose function can be satisfactorily supplied for just a few dollars you have to add some sort of fairy dust to it. This is generally true in the watch industry and the various tactics they use to survive deserve further analysis. For this particular company though, Art and Design appear to be the ideal things with which to befuddle the gullible emperors of the contemporary world.