Clearly walking on the same trajectory as the Bradley Watch, the Relevo Watch attempts at making time feel multisensorial. Sure, you experience time with all your senses, but you measure it with just two – your eyes, and maybe your ears when there’s an alarm or a chime. Relevo wants you to be able to touch time too. A conceptual watch by Nuno Teixeira, the Relevo uses a bumped surface to tell time. The watch’s face comes with a synthetic cloth on it, which gets sucked downwards by a vacuum to reveal two bumps on the surface underneath. The central bump (more like a linear ridge) tells the hours, while an outer bump tells the minutes. These two undulations move in 360, creating a watch face that you can see (because of the highlights and shadows) but also feel with your fingers to tell the time!
Designer: Nuno Teixeira
The beauty of the Relevo is that it reinvents the watch archetype. It doesn’t do anything drastically different – you can still read the time the way you would on any other watch – but there’s a breath of freshness here. While the watch is entirely conceptual (and the underlying tech isn’t completely chalked out), its approach to minimalism is truly remarkable. There’s nothing on the watch apart from two dynamic islands (see what I did there?) that move around in 360 degrees. No markings, no glowing hands, no date window, not even any branding. Yet, the watch is incredibly expressive.
The rest of the watch, however, is business as usual. It has a metal body, fabric straps, and a crown at the 3 o’clock position that lets you adjust the time. The watch also is visualized in 3 colors – black, white, and a rather eye-catching red.
