The History of the Apple Watch ⇥ wired.com

Apple is giving a lot of behind-the-scenes interviews and sneak peeks these days; far more than I remember them doing in the post-iCEO era. First, it was an unprecedented look into Jony Ive’s process, granted to the New Yorker. Now, David Pierce at Wired scored an exclusive scoop with a few Apple executives:

Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels famously encourages his staff to work crazy hours because, he maintains, people tend to be most creative and most fearless when they’re deliriously tired. So it went in the Apple design studio: As the team worked away on app-launch animations and the new iOS 7 Control Center, daytime conversations about smartphone software led to late-night discussions about other devices. Questions started coalescing around the idea of a watch: What could it add to people’s lives? What new things could you do with a device that you wear? Around this time, Ive began a deep investigation of horology, studying how reading the position of the sun evolved into clocks, which evolved into watches. Horology became an obsession. That obsession became a product.

Along the way, the Apple team landed upon the Watch’s raison d’être. It came down to this: Your phone is ruining your life.

Intriguing stuff. Included in this feature is a particularly fascinating gallery that gives a taste of the UI design process; you should definitely check it out.