Design is Action. Brand is Time.

My source on all things watches sent me two links the other day. One was to this Paul Graham article on the Swiss watch industry. He seems very upset about brand. He gets into this idea that brand ruined Swiss watchmaking. Well, this rallied the watch folks, and a quick Search will return a ton of responses. It's kind of funny that what people do in these days of supposed tech dominance, is respond by writing essays. Feels a bit 18th century, but don't misunderstand, I am here for it. Wait until I turn these posts into printed pamphlets.

Is branding opposed to design?

PG says that watchmaking should only be about engineering – that once watches got as accurate as possible and as thin as possible – that's it. He calls it The Golden Age. Well, that was up to the 70s, what was anyone supposed to do since? Of course when the watch companies accomplished the engineering, they pushed design further, but for him that somehow sullied the purity of the engineering. And I think he tends to conflate the terms brand and design a lot throughout. It's not like design somehow escaped the watch industry prior to his schism, but he seems to think so. Exhibits A-C:

While Omega was redesigning their movements, Patek was redesigning their cases. Or more precisely, designing their cases, because until then they hadn't.

How could merely designing a distinctive case be so important? Because it turned the entire watch into an expression of brand.

Branding isn't merely orthogonal to good design, but opposed to it. Branding by definition has to be distinctive. But good design, like math or science, seeks the right answer, and right answers tend to converge. Branding is centrifugal; design is centripetal.

Wait, what? He's saying that branding moves away from a center (centrifugal), and design moves toward a center (centripetal). What is the center? He's attempting to apply logic to an emotional argument. If the center is the "right answer," design does seek the right answer, but there can be many right answers.

You can't remove feeling.

I had put all this to the side until I came across this quote from Ken Sakata (who writes about fashion and design, not watches) that I think really sums up the issue I have with PG and his overall design-deaf tone:

Refusing to engage with the emotional story of a product is seen as a sort of sophistication, that you have not been manipulated emotionally. “I just see the product for the product.” This detachment is seen as savvy, instead of an art-less way to appreciate art.

It's the emotional component of design that PG doesn't really want to engage with. He clearly has an emotional connection with his Golden Age watches, but doesn't want to admit that they were designed in any way, or that he feels anything other than impressed with the engineering. To reference Sakata, he feels sophisticated because he thinks he's leaving emotion out of it. But you don't write a 6,000 word essay about something you don't have feelings for.

You can't remove design.

Design is an action. You cannot create a product without engaging design – good or bad. Nothing engineered exists in a vacuum. Brand is something you can help craft with design, but it also involves many layers of consumer interaction over time. Some of those layers you will not have control over.

So, it's not like these companies created brands overnight, or suddenly started designing their watches. They each decided to push design in distinctive directions. Why is that bad? Some were hits. Some were misses. For some reason PG goes in for a snide comment about how women wear watches. If he likes his Golden Age watches, great! Who's going to tell him there was design involved in those too? And that even before all the individual watch companies fell out of the 70s, that the "Swiss watch industry" was already a brand.