The World's Most Irritating Watch? Only $42,200!

But some intriguing new watch designers are chucking all the rules out of the Swiss window, replacing classic numerals with decidedly less user-friendly elements such as floating discs and skulls. I talked to three relative newbies in the watchmaking world about the conceptual possibilities beyond a standard watch dial. They certainly don’t see their work as faddish.

Crispin Jones of London-based Mr Jones Watches has produced the Last Laugh, a watch whose dial depicts a skull. To decipher the time, you must drop everything and peer closely at the skull’s teeth. Hours appear on two front teeth of the upper row while the lower row shows the minutes.

Mr. Jones considers the timepiece a meditation on mortality. As for time-telling conventions, he said, “I find it really interesting that we accept that a short line indicates hours and a longer line indicates minutes. We don’t question this—it seems to be a part of the natural order of things, but it’s a design, a human invention.” An invention ripe for reinvention, apparently.

Israeli watchmaker Itay Noy’s Part Time Sun and Moon watch is an exercise in experimentation. The enigmatic dial features five windows: a central one showing minutes, surrounded by four additional apertures indicating seconds, hours, day (with a sun) and night (with a moon). Sound complicated? That may be the point: Mr. Noy believes his design increases the wearer’s sense of involvement with his watch—which might not sound that desirable, unless you’re Tom Hanks’s “Castaway” character and are sick of talking to your soccer ball.

Mr. Noy said of his experiment, “I wanted to break the ordinary look of a watch by moving the hands from the center and adding more information. The wearer needs to collect pieces of information from five windows in order to read the time.” Ideally, the wearer is not rushing to catch a plane.

Antwerp industrial designer Benoît Mintiens of Ressence designed train interiors and luggage before he transitioned into watches, and says he believes the essence of any good product is functionality. Yet how functional his creative watch dials are might depend on how thoroughly you have studied the detailed instructions that come with his watches. A Ressence watch features a grouping of discs floating on oil. The symbol on the hour disc serves as the hand. Other discs indicating seconds, minutes, days of the week, temperature of the oil and status of the entire mechanism float around like tropical fish in an aquarium. It’s a trippy user experience, to say the least.

You probably wouldn’t consider going for a wildly experimental watch unless you already own a more standard one. But for the collector looking to branch out, or even someone who’s just mad about ingenious design, it’s worth exploring these less than forthcoming faces—even if it means that telling time might become rather time-consuming.