1. Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius believed that women thought in two dimensions, while men could grapple with three. Do you agree? supplementary assigments text 29

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SWATCH

Founded 1983 Biel-Bienne, Switzerland

Unable to compete with the plethora of cheap electronic watches being mass-produced in the Far East, and in particular Japan, by the mid-1970s the Swiss watch industry was deep in crisis. Against this background, Nicolas Hayek (b. 1928) made the strategic decision to develop a new watch brand that would rival the sales of Japanese models and rescue the embattled Swiss watch industry. The resulting slim plastic watch was based on a prototypical design by Ernst Thonke, Jacques Muller and Elmar Mock of Hayek Engineering AG. Comprising only 51 components (compared to the 90 or more components normally required in a conventional watch), it was very well suited to large-scale mass production. By combining high technology with affordability and artistic, emotional styling, the Swatch launch in 1983. Its success was boosted by the fact that the watch was being marketed along the same lines as haute couture, with new "collections" launched every season. By producing limited editions for collectors as well as a range of "classic" watches in every possible style and colour, Swatch ensured that it had a design to suit almost every taste. Thanks to the remarkable success of the Swatch, the Swiss watch industry regained its leading position in the sector in 1984. The following year, Hayek and a number of Swiss investors gained control of the Swatch Group, which included other brands such as Blancpain, Omega, Longines, Rado, Tissot, Certina, Mido, Hamilton, Balmain, Calvin Klein, Lanco and the children's range Flik Flak. Today, the company is the world's largest manufacturer of finished watches. Over 200 million Swatch watches have been sold to date, ranging from the standard plastic model to the metal cased Irony. The Swatch Group was also highly instrumental in the development of the diminutive Smart car in the late 1990s.

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Convergent design

Increasingly, designers are asked to contribute to the overall strategy for promotion of a product. This element of ‘convergence’ is typically represented by the work of the designer Jonathan Ives for Apple computers. Convergent design brings together practitioners and processes that traditionally were thought of as separate categories and activities, in-cluding product design, advertising and marketing. The end of the 20th century saw this important new term being coined to describe shifts in the design process that were to change the profession. Now the understanding of what product design involves has broadened in scope to include corporate and strategic consulting and brand development. A company image is still defined by its products but increasingly also through advertising and branding. In this convergence, product design becomes the old- style brand message and now seamlessly combines innovative technology with advertising campaigns. Convergent design means that product design and advertising share the same process and communicate the same identity, quality, function and significance of the object. They employ a common visual vocabulary and by working together achieve more market success.

The launch of Apple’s iPod is the single most successful example of convergent design — the integration of object, copy and advertising image. In the 21st century this and the merging of advertising and design is the model for practice in the majority of the creative industries. The word ‘convergent’ is also widely used to describe changes in the communications industry in which separate services - fax, email, telephone, video, etc. — are now supplied in a single machine.