Form Us With Love + Tid
Two Swedish studios team up to keep perfect time
“The wristwatch lost its essentiality when devices for showing the time moved into everyone’s pocket,” notes Petrus Palmér of design agency Form Us With Love on the impetus for its latest collaboration, this time with a new Swedish watch company Tid.
Tid is the short Swedish word for time, yet the company is far from short in its ambition to create unique, well-crafted products based around the parameters of time.
The timepiece fuelling the launch of Tid is No.1, a sleek functional piece that reduces the functions of a watch to the barest of essentials—an easy-to-read dial, adjustable strap, and only two choices of color. The No.1 model is made of stainless steel, milled and then given a black ion coating for durabilty, a finish that gives the piece just the right amount of matte versus glass on the wrist, while the only noticable branding is punched into the side.
“The idea of designing No.1 came from the somewhat paradoxical insight that wristwatches had become obsolete. As product designers influenced by the Scandinavian traditions of functionalism, we were intruigued by this fact,” continues Palmér, on their motivation for the move into this new territory, being a design team better versed in the interiors and furniture sectors.
While many watch connoisseurs would argue that the wristwatch as a functional item is not as obsolete as the designers might suggest, the direction which this notion led the creators is a novel one. “Faced with the challenge of designing an object, when that specific object’s raison d’ettre was very much in question, we turned our focus in a more philosophical direction—how do you design for time?”
The answer to the question is a sophisticated mid-priced wristwatch that could work well as an everyday beater as it would in more formal situations. The Form Us With Love for Tid watch sells online for SEK 1,995.
