How a timepiece is redefining our squeezed-for-time schedules

With the advent of our digital lives combining with our real ones there is this notion that we are ruled by our calendars. Think about the last time you asked a friend to send you a calendar invite for simply going for a coffee or plan an evening out. The Calendar Watch takes a stab at designing a wearable that doesn’t sacrifice traditional watchmaking design but still features some sort of “smart” feature — in this case, syncing up with your digital calendar and displaying that info at a glance.

The Calendar watch is the digital calendar in visual form placed into a watch face. The product makers have a unique take on the how a watch can be used in our daily life. The watch face offers not only the traditional hour and minute hands but an advanced shading system that is connected to your online calendar. Dark segments on the watch face mean meetings and light spaces mean free time. The application and the watch currently sync with the following calendars: iCalendar, Google Calendar, Outlook, Facebook Events, Yahoo!, Yandex, and the team says it will be adding more.

The makers also have designed the pieces to be interchangeable, allowing you to swap in differently colored lugs to create a unique timepiece. Changing the lugs with the provided tool is quick, so you can tailor the watch to match your mood or outfit.

Strategists are exploring the design challenges and opportunities presented by the forthcoming screens on our wrists. These modern tweaks and design considerations are beginning to materialize in-market.

But some don’t call them smartwatches. The company bringing us this novel wrist jewelry is called What? Watch. The company makes hybrid watches that combine classical watchmaking with digital mono-functions, technology and style, in distinctive and original ways. From Tokyo to Helsinki, Vienna to New York, the global design team works to reshape the way that people, particularly its customers, perceive and interact with time.

Back during watch week, PSFK Lab’s Adriana Krasniansky wrote that: “the dawn of a new consumer era is upon us,” mentioning that the release of the Apple watch could usher in a new age of large-scale smartwatch adaptation.

Designers, developers, and technologists have rallied around and are anticipating the changes associated with smaller, wearable screens. As people begin figuring out how to navigate a scaled-down interface or altogether create new ways to interact with things like news you’d want to read directly from your wrist.

There is great merit to exploring how the digital meeting the analog will impact our habits. The takeaway here is not so much that this watch maker is upending a classic but finding new modes of what makes that classic useful and how it fits into our lives. This, of course, is all happening as we ride the wave of technology, fundamentally shifting how we live, work and play — no matter the time or place.

The Calendar Watch | What? Watch | PSFK Watch Week

Originally published at www.psfk.com on February 26, 2016.