Casio F-91W: The Cheapest Design Classic

The Casio F-91W is a digital quartz watch that Casio launched in 1989. It has a small square case of resin, an LCD window, alarm, hourly chime, stopwatch and calendar. It costs a few pounds, lasts several years on a battery and has sold in tens of millions.

Facts

Casio and the quartz wave

Casio was founded in 1946 by Tadao Kashio in Tokyo, and his brothers soon joined him, and became known first for calculators. In the 1970s the company moved into wristwatches, and quartz-driven digital watches became a major product. The background is the technology that the Seiko Astron began; read more in the guide to the quartz crisis and compare with Swatch, which responded from Switzerland. The company’s first digital wristwatch, the Casiotron, came in 1974, and Casio afterwards developed watches that withstood shocks and weather, among them the G-Shock from 1983, which gave the brand a reputation for robustness.

The F-91W was launched in 1989 as a simple, robust watch for everyday use. The Casio F-91W is today one of the world’s best-selling watches and is still made largely unchanged.

The form

The case is a small rounded-square housing of resin, in black or grey, with a strap of the same material. The display shows the time in large figures and has four buttons on the sides, three for functions and one for the backlight. Everything is functional: no ornament, no decoration, no brand embellishment beyond the name and the model number. The screen has dark figures on a pale grey ground and shows time, date and weekday at once. The colour is neutral, so that the watch suits both work clothes and finer garments, and its flat, light form means one hardly notices it on the wrist.

It is the extreme simplicity that makes it interesting. It has no side ornaments and no colour, and it has in principle had the same form since 1989. That is why it is often discussed as an example of anonymous design, design that does not try to be seen. Compare with Dieter Rams’s principle that good design is as little design as possible, in the guide to Dieter Rams.

The functions

Despite the price the watch has everything one needs: a daily alarm, an hourly chime that beeps every full hour, a stopwatch with hundredths of a second and a calendar that handles months and weekdays itself. A small light, the backlight, comes on at the press of a button. The watch withstands splashes but not diving, and the battery lasts about seven years. The alarm is a short beep every morning at the set time, and the hourly chime can be switched off if it is disturbing.

The cheapness rests on large volume. The same movement, called a module, is made in enormous series. An ordinary version often costs only a few pounds, which makes it one of the best-value objects you can buy. It therefore reaches every group, from schoolchildren to collectors.

Anonymous and sought after

In the 2000s the F-91W has acquired a cultural status. It is worn by designers, artists and fashion people as an ironic contrast to expensive luxury watches like the Cartier Tank or Max Bill’s watch. It has become a symbol of the present day’s appreciation of the everyday.

At the same time the watch is not perfect. The screen is small, the plastic can be scratched and the strap wears. But it is precisely the compromise between price, function and durability that makes it a classic: a watch that never tries to be anything other than what it is. Anyone who wants to understand what a good product is can begin by asking what could be taken away from the F-91W, and the answer soon comes: almost nothing.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Why is the Casio F-91W often discussed as a design classic?