Designer watches made from metal powder

What do you envisage under post-industrial design for the urban environment? Designer Umberto Palermo from Turin has taken inspiration from this motto to create a watch collection entitled WATCH-UP using the generative additive manufacturing process on metals. The unusual look was presented to the public as part of a charity event called "Event for a Smile" on 1^st of June 2012. At the fund-raising event, Umberto Palermo and Santo Versace, President of the Operation Smile Italia Onlus Foundation, welcomed their guests on the roof terrace of Up Design, which is based in Turin. Umberto Palermo, Italian designer and President of the company Up Design works together with companies such as Fiat, Faw, Indesit, Scholtes, Hotpoint, Ariston Thermo, Cantieri Rodriquez, and Politecnico di Torino. Palermo presents UP Design at international design fairs such as Frankfurt 2011, Milan 2012 and at the motor shows Auto Shanghai 2011 and Qatar Motor Show 2012.

New ideas

Inspired by the idea of giving shape to abstract ideas, Umberto Palermo began to focus on designing exclusive products. "I wanted to develop a new, unusual design language for objects which are based on completely new fabrication methods. The result of this work was shown off by Palermo in Turin: The BIKE-UP collection, a new bicycle made from carbon and WATCH-UP, a series of watches produced generatively from metal powder without any casting or milling.

WATCH-UP: Metal powder is turned into a watch

The innovative basic idea behind the WATCH-UP watch collection lies in the fabrication of the entire watch-case using the generative LaserCUSING process. In order to give shape to Palermo's idea of creating a unique watch, he familiarised himself with all the possibnike