Time for a change?

Spring session of after-school classes has begun. In the first class, we challenged our squad to redesign the watch. Why would we pick an endangered object for a makeover? These days, if we want to know the time, most of us whip out our cell phones. Since, tweens are our guide to future trends, we are intrigued to see how they think we'll tell the time…

So, what makes a watch a watch? Clearly our students don't think a watch needs to be limited to wrists. Whilst some of them made variations on the wrist watch, many of the kids came up with wearable devices: watch goggles, a watch on a nose clip, one for a leg.

This watch straps to the head and has an external dialling system which rotates the screen displays.

Some watches do more than just telling the time. The green device (on the right) clips to the nose. Stay up past your bedtime and you'll be squirted with an ice cold bubble mix stored in the pouch. This time piece sounds good for teen mornings too!

There are variations on the display, ranging from triangular and conical watches to a watch that has a completely different timescale (indicating the year and millennium, rather than minutes and hours).

And then of course, there's technology…

This watch includes a head piece and a digital readout on a snake draped around the neck!

This top secret design uses wireless transmitters to beam the time directly into your brain. No visual display necessary (although brain implants may be!) Brain-computer interfaces are being intensely researched and may be a closer reality than we realize.