The right time.
As a child he always wanted to know how things worked and how they were made. He often ended up painting what he observed. Till today, his doodle sketchbook, in which he has recorded and continues to pen down thousands of impressions at various points in his life, is his best friend and constant companion. Meet Neil Foley, India’s leading watch designer who has a genius of the mind of a scientist and an artist all rolled into one.
Since childhood, the inquisitiveness that led him to redefine a product became a passion with Foley. The fact that creating something 
new and unique that was tangible and could improve and influence the lifestyle of the masses was the chief reason why he chose watch design as a career.
Foley is a graduate of the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. He joined the institute for a five-year professional product design programme. Later, he pursued a course in business design at the Domus Academy, Milan, Italy. He’s an industrial designer and leads the Fastrack design team for Titan. Incidentally, he has been designing watches for the company for the past 14 years. “NID teaches you a design process that one can apply to any product category. One needs to further apply this design process to a specific product category such as watches or any other product to become an expert in it,” he points out.
Creativity plays a very important role where design is concerned. “Price, affordability and manufacturability are hygiene factors today. If your design is not unique, it’s not going to be looked at and therefore not noticed and hence not bought,” he says, adding, “Today, it is gratifying to see that a small product such as a watch that I design has the ability to touch a million lives in a positive manner.”
Watch design comes under a larger umbrella of industrial and lifestyle design. A watch designer gets to design sporty looking watches for people who are not sportsmen but are sports enthusiasts, high fashion watches, youthful watches, classical watches and ultra modern watches. “To me the overall skill sets remain the same but the key differentiator is the ability to grasp the need of the target consumer and apply that requirement functionally and tastefully through design,” he says.
It’s important for a watch designer to be sensible to detail, have good presentation and conceptualisation skills as “design is an expression of what one thinks, feels and experiences,” he says.
Last but not least, this profession does not have any boundaries like other professions and “if you’re a kind of person who is ready to learn and relearn with every new project, there is no better profession that design,” he adds.
According to Mahendra Chauhan, design manager, Titan design studio, watches are an amalgamation of functionality, technology and form. “They also have a strong lifestyle quotient and that is the reason why I became a watch designer.”
With several international brands coming into the country, there is a need for frequent product launches resulting in increased demand for designers who can constantly come up with differentiated designs, adds Revathi Kant, design head at the same company.
Author: Vandana Ramnani
Date: 19th May, 2010
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