Designer wins international award for Braille watch

From the Costa Mesa Daily Pilot in California:

It was a photograph of a slick European watch that got freelance industrial designer David Chavez (pictured) thinking about how the blind tell time.

“It was a very simple and interesting design,” Chavez said. “So I started to do some research and came up with the idea of a Braille watch.”

Now the 33-year-old Costa Mesa resident’s design for a movable Braille watch, called Haptica, is earning him international praise. The Haptica design has already garnered him two global design awards. Now he hopes to win a grant from a Spanish organization for the blind to perfect his design.

The watch that first got Chavez’s brain ticking was a high-end, futuristic-looking creation by the Swiss company Urwerk, which displays the time through four-numbered satellite dials that rotate around its face.

A student at the time at the Art Institute of California Orange County in Costa Mesa, Chavez decided to create a Braille timepiece for his senior project that would allow the user to tell time simply by swiping a finger across the face of the watch.

In his research Chavez discovered that there has never been an ideal solution for the blind when it comes to telling time.

There are digital watches that announce the time out loud, but it’s not very discreet, Chavez said.

“If a blind person is in a meeting and they want to check the time, they can’t do it without everyone else knowing,” he said.

There are also watches for the blind where the glass on the face lifts up for the user to feel the hour and minute hands.

“Typically the user mashes their finger in there and feels the hour and minute hand to tell time, but it’s very imprecise,” Chavez said. “You can be as much as an hour and five minutes off.”

Alan Cusolito, academic director for the industrial design program at the Art Institute, tried to talk Chavez out of using the watch for his senior project at first, he said.

“When I saw the project, I had reservations about it — I wanted to see how it was going to come out,” Cusolito said. “I tend to steer students toward consumer projects, but this one was a specialty item, so right away, your market gets limited.”

Chavez ended up proving him wrong, Cusolito said.“As he fleshed it out, it really turned into tangible design,” he said.

Chavez’s design features six, four-unit cells that raise to display the time, much the way a digital clock works. The watch also uses military time instead of a 12-hour clock.

Chavez’s design was awarded the Spark! Award, last week in San Francisco, a global award for industrial design. The watch was one of 17 designs that received top Spark! honors from a field of more than 360 entries from around the world.

The design also won a bronze 2008 International Design Excellence Award, widely considered to be “the Oscars of industrial design,” Chavez said.

Chavez hopes to win a research and development grant to perfect his watch from the National Organization of the Spanish Blind, or ONCE.

Cusolito said he has no doubt Chavez will go far in the design world.“He’s the consummate product designer,” he said. “Really passionate about his work and very detail-oriented.”