Eclipse Watch
A fully customizable digital OLED Watch with unique
design features and modding capabilities.
Role: Everything
WHAT IF YOU COULD WEAR A WATCH
THAT PERSONIFIED YOU?
This is a question that has been brewing inside me for quite a while. Since I was young, I have always been fascinated by watches. Their intricate and sophisticated mechanisms, their craftsmanship, everything about watches just resonated with me. When my school assigned us with the challenge of leaving our
comfort zones, I decided that I wanted to tackle this question, and design my own watch. Over the course of 6 months, this project grew into a full-fledged concept, that has since been known as Eclipse. To illustrate my concept, I created a motion graphic video. Be sure to check out the rest of the case study.
It all started with sketching out what I wanted the watch to look like. I didn't think about how it would work or what function it would serve, I just started sketching, trying to establish what I wanted it to be. Eventually, this lead to cool ideas such as the angular, tilted shape and the LCD display, that would make Eclipse what it finally became.
The idea behind Eclipse is that it's a fully customizable watch; you can pick the color and texture of the rubber band, the watch body itself and the actual watch interface. Users would be able to create their own watchfaces with a digital watchface creator on their computers, tablets or mobile phones, which they could then sync to their Eclipses. They could change colors and interfaces on the fly and they could show their designs off to all their friends, family and colleagues.
The hardest part about creating Eclipse was its design. Since I’m not a product designer by trade, I spent a lot of time fidelling with the design to get it just right and functional at the same time. For instance, coming up with the modding mechanism without straying away from my design proved quite a challenge.
Because the whole concept of Eclipse is based around customization and variation,
I experimented with different types of variations, to see how it would look.
After I finalized the design of the watch, I had to visualize it in 3D, to see if it would really work. I first modelled it using Sketchup, to set up the basic measurements and scale. After I created this basic model, I set out to create a high quality and fully detailed 3D model in Cinema4D.
Because I ultimately needed to present my concept to lots of people at a schoolfair, I needed a way to really bring my concept to life, without actually having a working prototype. To do this, I decided to create a motion graphic that would quickly explain the concept to my audience, while at the same time being very enjoying and engaging to watch.
I really wanted to give the user as much freedom as possible, so that was my primary focus as I was designing the customization interface.