Caught my eye > Indian Stretchable Time

25Feb12

This one made me laugh out loud. Time indeed is a flexible commodity for many of us in India. There is an unsaid rule of sorts, a subtext that once understood adds clarity to interactions. This watch makes it explicit.

The product note states: In India, ‘fashionably late’ is safely replaced with ‘predictably late’. Cow blockades, politician escorts, and cratered roads, compound the problem and offer a valid excuse. So when you reach half-an-hour after the appointed time, you don’t explain yourself. You wait for the other person to arrive. We used this life insight, and added some dark humour to it. We simply added a suffix to time periods. And moved the numerals from their classic perpendicular positions, tilting them to an approximate point on the dial. Hence six was not six. Eight was not eight. It was ‘six-ish’ and ‘eight-ish’. Thus was born the ‘ish Watch’.

A closer look left me with a thought – the shifting of the numerals, the addition of the suffix ‘ish’, the slant of the suffix – it feels like many elements trying to say the same thing. For me, any one of them, used by itself, would have done the job. Having said that, the concept brings to life a quirky aspect of life in India and is charming for having done that.

> Designed by HYPHEN brands run by Prassana Sankhe and Alok Nanda. Available at Filter, Kala Ghoda, Mumbai. Mail info@filtershop.in for details.

Credits:
Design firm: HYPHEN
Creative Director: Prasanna Sankhe
Designer: Prasanna Sankhe
Writer: Cyrus Daruwala
Photographer: Ashish Vaidya
Music: Ferzad Variyava
Producer: Fabian Fernandes
Editor: Basu
Fabricator: Suresh
Agency coordinator: Jennifer Fernandes

Filed under: Indian Product Design   |  14 Comments
Tags: Alok Nanda, Hyphen Brands, Indian Product Design, Indian Stretchable Time, Prassana Sankhe