Isra Arif, the first, female Pakistani watchmaker to graduate with Watchmaker’s of Switzerland Training and Education Program accreditation:
When we wear a watch passed down from our parents or grandparents, it holds a story, a connection to the past.
Digital watches offer convenience, but they lack the soul and legacy that come with a hand-crafted piece.
While Andy Hoffman reports on the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry's warning that exports outpace demand, it's the peek behind the scenes at the tools Montblanc favours for pressing the hands onto its watches, more than the long-overdue depression in new watch sales, that piqued my interest.
Brandon Moore, reporting for Watches by SJX, provides an inside look at Biver's quaint watch finishing and assembly facilities in the Swiss countryside on the outskirts of Geneva.
Raw components for their chiming tourbillon are supplied by Le Cercle des Horlogers, with Dubois Dépraz taking care of the brand's automatic movement components, and Efteor responsible for delivering the cases.
Christopher Butler on design:
The most innovative solutions often come from designers who are aware of conventions but not beholden to them. They know the rules well enough to break them purposefully. They understand context but aren’t limited by precedent. They’ve cultivated the discipline to look away from existing solutions when it matters most — during the critical phases of ideation and development when uniqueness of vision is most vulnerable to external influence.
When we constantly reference existing solutions, our work inevitably gravitates toward the mean. We solve for expectations rather than needs.
Great design requires both looking and looking away — studying and ignoring, learning and forgetting, absorbing and creating. The magic happens not just in what we choose to see, but in what we deliberately choose not to see.
Nora Atkinson, writing from the Museum of Craft & Design in San Francisco:
There’s something powerful in working with your hands, in the rhythm of making, in shaping the world through touch and attention. Craft has long offered a feeling of agency to those pushed to the margins, a feeling of continuity to those in chaos, a feeling of accomplishment to those who dedicate their attention. It reminds us that we’re still capable of creating something beautiful—even when things feel uncertain or broken.
Employing little more than a rusty, old tin of pipe tobacco and a handful of household items, Rob Morrison, in a clip from an old episode of Australia’s Curiosity Show, demonstrates how to create an isochronous curve.
Isochronism is an integral aspect of crafting a reliable timekeeper and you can see precisely why in the behavior of the balls that Morrison places along the curve.
