Clocks and watches are among the most frequent recipients of unnecessary design. Sometimes, the novel concoction ends in disaster. Other times, like with the Domino Clock, it’s actually clever and interesting.
Created by Carbon, the wall-mounted timepiece uses three giant dominoes to tell the time of day. The procedure to read time is simple enough and the appearance is very elegant, making it one of the few creatively-designed clocks I can actually welcome into my living room.
The Domino Clock uses the articulated dots on each of the three dominoes’ faces to tell time. The first one corresponds to the hour, with the succeeding two standing for the two digits of the minutes.
Most impressive about the whole project is that they stayed away from the obvious modern solution, which is to light up each dot with LEDs. Instead, they used a multi-sided block with both black and white sides, rotating as needed in accordance with the time-telling mechanism. They also deliberately made the dots flip slowly, so you can watch the dots change in unison as time moves.
Carbon will have the Domino Clock gracing the walls of their new studio sometime in 2011. There is no word on plans of selling it commercially in the future.