I Designed a Swatch with AI

Unboxing my piece unique.

Announced last year, Swatch’s AI-DADA platform is now live, enabling customers to design and build their own custom Swatch with a design that will never be repeated. With a low entry price and quick turnaround, I took the platform for a spin.

Why AI

Swatch has been a design-oriented brand since its debut in 1983. Not only has Swatch produced a dizzying array of original designs of its own, over the years the brand has collaborated with celebrated artists and leading institutions to democratise access to wearable art.

About a decade ago, Swatch’s world-class logistics infrastructure enabled it to offer customised watches via an online configurator that enabled customers to mix and match different elements from a pre-selected range of options. That was quickly followed by the ability to generate a custom-printed design, by dragging a Swatch template over a selection of human-created patterns and designs.

The AI-DADA system, launched earlier this year, builds on this basis in way that only Swatch could pull off. The system leverages an undisclosed large language model (LLM) to generate a custom design based on a user’s 300-character prompt.

The result is a made-to-order Swatch of the customer’s own design, delivered in as few as five days. What’s more, the cost is little more than an off-the-shelf model, at just US$195. With little to lose, I took the plunge.

AI-DADA Swatch watches are powered by standard quartz movements in the typical New Gent case size.

Three strikes

The first thing a user will notice when designing their AI-DADA unique piece is the limited number of daily attempts. Perhaps to keep compute costs under control and prevent large-scale bot activity, the system limits users to three prompts per day. It’s also not as instant as what users might be used to from the likes of ChatGPT or Claude.

That said, there are presumably a number of layers of analysis going on behind the scenes to prevent the production of offensive designs, so the lag is understandable.

Unfortunately, the three-prompt limit prevents users from getting a good feel for what kinds of prompts produce the best results. I experimented with a wide range of prompt types over four days, from short prompts with just a few words to more complex engineered prompts, generating 12 designs in total. Only one design was to my liking, and it happened to be the second design I generated, suggesting there’s an element of luck involved.

If I had to guess what made this prompt successful, it would be its lack of ambiguity. I asked for a Swatch inspired by the Swiss rail system, featuring a red Swiss train, and showcasing the attractions of Switzerland. That’s it.

The resulting design features a crisp Swiss flag, a red Swiss train, and meandering white railway track that runs across both straps and the dial. The design also features this suggestion of snow-capped mountains, a grazing cow, and what might be a factory with a pitched roof and a chimney (or possibly a church with a bell tower).

Impressive speed, acceptable quality

I didn’t know what to expect when I clicked the buy button, so I was quite surprised to get the shipping notification two days later, and to find the box on my doorstep just five days after checkout. The combination of mass-customisation and rapid delivery demonstrates the industrial know-how of the Swatch Group.

The watch was packaged in a special AI-DADA box marked “1/1”, giving it a sense of occasion. The watch itself is a typical 41 mm New Gent format with a standard Swatch quartz movement. The entire case is made of transparent plastic, and the ‘dial’ design is actually painted on the case back. Judging by the edges of the design, it appears to be some type of spray paint or ink-jet process. By the looks of it, the green colour was sprayed first, following by the white backing.

The quality is perfectly acceptable for the price, but the uneven edges are mildly disappointing. Of course, the main feature of the case back is the amusing “1/1” case number.