The past is a time-honored inspiration for many watch designers, but not the British industrial designer Tej Chauhan. He had his sights on the future when creating a second watch for the Swiss watchmaker Rado.
Unveiled in February at the India Art Fair in Delhi, the Rado DiaStar Original x Tej Chauhan ($2,250) has a graphic black dial with silver sunburst rays marking the minutes — and bright blue rays for the quarter-hour between 9 and 12 o’clock.
Those hours have personal meaning for Mr. Chauhan. He is the most productive from 9 p.m. to midnight, he said, and 9 a.m. to noon is “when my brain slowly starts to wake up.”
His design stamp also can be seen in the day and date window, at 3 o’clock on the dial, which presents information in the designer’s proprietary font. The name of each day has a distinctive color, although they can all be displayed in white if an alternate setting is used.
The case of the 38 millimeter by 45 millimeter automatic watch is made in gold-color steel and topped with a gold-color bezel in Rado’s Ceramos composite, a mix of ceramic and metal alloy. The strap is a puffy rubber design in light gray, closed with a folding clasp.
Rado’s DiaStar design was first presented in 1962 and marketed as the world’s first scratchproof watch.
The new design, Mr. Chauhan said, was inspired by the future, in particular science fiction, landscapes generated by artificial intelligence and the 2019 film “Ad Astra,” starring Brad Pitt, which featured reflective gold helmets and spacesuits. (“I’m really into spacesuits — it’s a Tej thing,” he said.)
He said that the future — “where I live half the time” — was constantly on his mind. “When I’m designing things, I’m looking both into the future and partly in the past as well, trying to combine this kind of futurism with a sense of accessibility.”
Rado said the watch was sold globally, primarily through its website.
Mr. Chauhan’s first collaboration with the brand, the steel and ceramic Rado True Square x Tej Chauhan, was introduced in 2020. Its 38-millimeter square dial also featured the blue quarter-hour indicators from 9 to 12 o’clock.
For Mr. Chauhan, who has designed consumer products for telecommunications businesses, automobile brands and other companies, the world of watches should continue to be an inspiration: “I like the concept of a watch being this completely kind of self sufficient, intricately engineered object that has one singular purpose — that is to tell the time.
“Time is one of the few things that we’ve got left which is not going to become obsolete,” he noted. “There’s something about that narrative that I find really interesting.”
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