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GlobalGrind had a great chat with Nooka founder Matthew Waldman last week and the designer and artist had a lot to say about his revolutionary brand.

Waldman founded cutting edge watch brand Nooka while waiting for a client in London. He was looking at a clock when he began to think about how time is taught to children and realized that he could create something new and innovative using a completely different method.

STORY: Nooka Zem Watch: Eargasms!

From Day One, Nooka has been synonymous with style, function and creativity. Nooka may be identified as a company that makes watches, but it is more than that.

Waldman was born in Queens, New York and gave up Harvard for a freelance design career at age 19. He has put a lot of thought and passion into his brand. 

Since its founding in 2005, Nooka has expanded to include apparel and scents and has a design philosophy that meshes well with 21st century living.

In part one of our interview we talk to Waldman about working with designer Karim Rashid, Nooka’s philosophy and how children are taught to read time. 

Check out our exclusive below!

GlobalGrind: You have a new line out designed by Karim Rashid. How did that partnership come about?

Matthew Waldman: Karim and I knew each other casually from the design world and one day I added him on Facebook. He emailed back immediately saying, ‘I always wanted to do a project with Nooka.’ It just organically evolved from that. The power of Facebook!

This the first Nooka watch with a round face. Were you surprised that it would take Karim Rashid to do that?

No, we have designed ourselves into this innovative design space, so we’re well known for that ’round the corner’ square watches and our bulky construction with the Polyurethane thing. These watches and all different design elements that make Nooka very iconic. But a lot of stores did request having a more conventional round watch. So when Karim submitted his designs and his ideas and they were round, it was the perfect opportunity to release a round face watch.

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What has been the response so far?

It’s been really good. Karim is well known internationally and it’s interesting to see how certain markets know who he is, and certain countries don’t know who he is. We’re a young brand, so experimenting with collaborations is always very educational but, over-all, good. The MoMA store, the Museum of Modern Art store in Tokyo, they used the Yogurt watch as an image for their latest ad campaign that they had in all the subways in Tokyo.

How would you convince someone to start wearing watches, someone who hasn’t worn one in 30 years?

Because they’re not watches! I didn’t come from the watch world. I never sat down and said, ‘I love watches, I am going to design a watch!’ It’s not how Nooka was born. Nooka has always been what I call Mind Style company or a design lab. The passion and the core ethos of the brand is universal language and universal communication. I don’t want to give you a too long story, but when I was doing interactive design in the late ’90s, before there were information architects, Nooka was born out of just retraining my brain to create more intuitive design processes. The process that Nooka was born out of was something totally removed from watches.

It turned into a watch but it wasn’t a watch project. Many people respond to the brand by exactly that. They say, ‘I don’t wear a watch but I wear a Nooka because it really expresses more of a philosophy, a type of optimism towards the future and technical-progressivism.’ If you’re someone that always wants something new, something that’s cutting edge, which is very much what fashion is all about, then you’re wearing it as an accessory, you’re not wearing it as a watch. I’d say a lot of our customers say they don’t wear watches, but they wear Nooka.

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What would you say has been the most interesting forward thinking design you’ve done to date? Would you say it’s the Zen H, or it’s the Zen V?

I’d say it’s the Zen H because they’re just purely graphical, they don’t have any numbers to reference on the face yet. Once you get use to reading them, they’re very easy, very intuitive and that’s the whole point: to try and make people question everyday objects. I think that’s when design is very successful. It’s either successful when it makes something seamless, but it’s also very successful when it provokes some kind of deeper interaction with the product. I think my products satisfy both of those goals.

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With Yogurt you deviate from the Z naming of the watch faces. Why are so many of your watch faces named with the letter Z?

The Yogurt line was named by Karim. It’s just a reference to the fruity colors and it works with the form. But the other naming convention that we have, the Z was actually the “N” in Nooka turned on it’s side. They referenced different parts of the design like Zots is dots and they don’t always reference something in English. Like the Zayou is from Sayou which means left and right in Japanese but they all reference something linguistically. Like Zub reference references the fact that they’re made out of rubber.

Can you talk a little bit how kids are taught how to read watches or clocks today?

There’s a cardboard clock on the wall and they move the hands. But the real problem, and this is something that gets very academic, but you learn how to tell time as kid and then you forget that it was ever difficult. I’m not saying that the Nooka interfaces is more or less intuitive than a regular face, but the fact of the matter is that for a regular analog like a digital or regular clock face, you have to learn how to count to 12 to tell the hours. You have to learn how to count to 60 for the minutes or you have to know your fractions. You have to know at least up to one quarter.

So there’s a linguistic component and there’s a mathematical component. Most kids just memorize it. But the part that’s not taught is that time based 12 math and everything else you learn when you’re learning math in first grade or second grade is base 10. You have 11, 12 you have 10, 20 and time is base 12. Then the minutes are 60, which is also base 12. 

I can assure that 99 percent of the kids taught in school are not taught that it’s based 12 and what the benefits of base 12 maths over base 10 are. The reason for this is probably because it’s too complicated higher base and lower base math; but it was remembering those parts of it that really inspired me to think well, ‘Why can’t I come up with an interface that just transcends what the base of the math is and just bring it down to the most common universal elements?’ That’s how I came up with it.