Entrepreneurs invent a watch with no time

Take a look at your watch or phone and notice the time. How much time has passed since you last thought about schoolwork, or about your crush? It’s probably hard to pinpoint exactly how long its been since either of these. Maybe you’ve actually been vacantly staring out the window without realizing how much time has passed.

The perception of time can be a disorienting thing. Ten seconds of waiting in a long line at Six Flags may feel like hours, but ten seconds on the roller coaster that you finally got to ride can feel like a millisecond. While working on problem sets at midnight can feel so time consuming, the same amount of time can feel so much shorter during a final. The mind can be very mischievous in this way.

A watch, called Durr, is designed to reorient the wearer in the dimension of time and to free him from the trickeries of the mind. Unlike any watch you have seen before, it has no hands, ticks or numbers; its just a solid, cylindrical, monochromatic block that is tied around your hands with a leather strap. It looks nothing more than a really tacky ornament for your wrists — but then it starts vibrating lightly. Then it vibrates again after five minutes. And again.

Durr is like a metronome that reminds you when five minutes have passed. It doesn’t necessarily tell you what time it is — although you can keep count — but it forces you to reflect what you’ve done in the past five minutes. Maybe you’ve actually been thinking about your crush since three vibrations, or 15 minutes, ago, and you need to get yourself together to finish your work. Or maybe it took you six vibrations to read a single page from your biology textbook, when it should have only taken one.

The watch was invented by two Norwegian entrepreneurs, Theo Tveterås and Lars Marcus Vedeler. They were, as many people have been at some point of their lives, nonplussed about how fast time flies when they were busy in their studio and how it stagnates immediately on the lazy work days. They decided to design Durr to create a tangible connection with time. Despite some criticism about Durr’s extreme simplicity and blandness, Tveterås and Vedeler were quite satisfied with the end product they had achieved.

One of the selling points of their company’s merchandise is deeply rooted in its single-purpose, simplistic designs, unlike those seen in many technologies today. For example, a few contemporary watches are able to store music in them, while some music players, in turn, can be strapped on a wrist like a watch. While the benefits of multipurpose items like these are obvious, some users appreciate the unique and aesthetic qualities of unifunctional products like Durr.

Durr can not only be a passive notifier of time, but it could also be a useful reminder. For example, if you strap on a Durr during a final, it may help you allocate your time to each question efficiently. If you spend, say, at least one vibration on the first problem to no avail, the next vibration from your watch may be a helpful call to move on.

The benefits of a watch with no time now seem more believable. Here’s the punch, however: Durr currently is sold for $120. For such a seemingly primitive technology, this may be a hefty price tag for most consumers. However, for those looking for a transcending experience in the dimension of time, it may be a good time to strap on a Durr and see what five minutes really means in your life.