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Edition 001: The Design Issue
Design is at the heart of all human creation. From the earliest flint hand axe to the most mind-bogglingly complicated jet fighter, design is the secret sauce that makes things function perfectly. Architect Louis Sullivan’s famous mantra Form follows Function suggests that an object’s function that is always the starting point in defining its appearance. And in that functionality – as with Marc Newson’s minimalist champagne bottle for Dom Perignon, there can also be great beauty. Here at Aera, we strive to celebrate the symbiosis of function and beauty in everything we create. To function, our watches must be tools for life. They must convey information – the passage of time – with clarity and precision. For us that clarity is created in the elliptical curve of a sapphire crystal contrast of white and black, of matt and polished surfaces, or in the eerie glow of Globolight indexes. But our watches must also function on the wrist, protect their movements against the elements and be comfortable and ergonomic to wear in order to achieve what we’re striving for; the elegance of simplicity. Here in the first edition of the Aera Journals, we focus on design both in our products and in the wider contemporary world.
A note from our founders
Welcome to our first edition of the Aera Journal, a place where we will explore and explain the things that inspire us, define us and drive us. It’s an opportunity to bring you into the world of Aera in an entertaining and informative way. Each month, we will focus on a different aspect of the world we, as watchmakers, inhabit, through the work of others and through our own efforts to create a brand founded on the notion of lasting value. We create what we call tools for life – pieces that are built to serve you every day and do it for a lifetime.
In the creation of each new Aera watch, we strive to look at what we do through the lenses of engineering, craft, design, responsibility and purpose to ensure we build the maximum authenticity, performance and functionality into our watches.
Time is our most valuable luxury. We hope you will enjoy spending a little of yours, each month, in our world.
Be well,
Jas Minhas & Olof Larsson
The Last Word
We tend naturally to think of design as essentially a sophisticated modern discipline, borne entirely out of industrialised production and creative progress, yet prehistoric archaeology has shown that it lies at the heart of human endeavour all the way back to the Stone Age. Take the Hoxne Hand Axe, unearthed in the village of the same name in Suffolk, England around 1797, which dates back 400,000 years. These double-edged tools were fashioned from flint or obsidian, materials that experimentation showed could be honed, in skilled hands, to extremely sharp and versatile tools. While flint knapping provided thousands of different blades for numerous very specific tasks, hand axes like the Hoxne axe were the multitools of their age, with a sharp point, and twin faceted blades, with the majority of the mass concentrated at the wider end to add power to the blow whether chopping wood, rendering meat or smashing bone. The result of hundreds if not thousands of years research, these objects represented the pinnacle of human ingenuity, the design informed entirely by their end purpose. And just like the modern icons of contemporary design, they have an alluring, elegant beauty about them that is borne out of our forebears’ efforts to solve a problem with the materials available and a whole lot of tinkering.
