Following a redesign of the Rado Ceramica to celebrate Rado’s fiftieth anniversary, Nadja Zerunian and François Nunez asked me to develop a completely new watch. At that time Rado was probably the only watchmaker using high-tech ceramics and, as invitations from the watch industry to designers like myself are rare, I was pleased to accept a second project.
I proposed a rounded square shape which at that time was not a very fashionable item, but I wanted it to to have a sporty and slightly digital character.
We named it the r5.5 after the radius at its corners. Working at such small scale was a surprise to a designer of chairs who’s used to adjustments of 5 mm here or there. In the watch business a unit of 1 equates to .01 mm!
Several models were developed, of which the black-and-white stopwatch and the platinum ceramic-finished models are perhaps the more successful.
Extracted from A Book of Things by Jasper Morrison (Lars Müller Publishers, 2015)