Activity tracking can be beautiful, and it doesn't require a screen or a battery.

Emulsion is an "analog activity tracker" from Norwegian design studio Skrekkøgle. It takes the form of a watch, but instead of mechanical components or a microprocessor, it relies on a mix of mineral oil and colored water. When you're at rest, the water settles into one big blob. When you're active, it disperses into an attractive splatter. It's maybe not so much an activity tracker as an activity indicator. It's also cheeky and poetic and frankly smart in ways today's wearables usually are not.

The project started as a joke. Lars Marcus Vedeler and Theo Tveterås, the duo behind Oslo-based Skrekkøgle, were thinking about the recent boom of activity trackers and the exaggerated promise that's come along with them. "They solve one thing, which is, you put a number to your activity, but they create this whole range of other issues," Vedeler says. You have to charge your device, and make sure it syncs with the rest of your gadget ecosystem. Then you have to figure out what to do with that number.

Vedeler and Tveterås started kicking around ideas for a low-tech alternative. The quest was largely tongue-in-cheek, but when they began experimenting with oil and water, they were struck by the expressive effect. "It was quite mesmerizing," Vedeler says. They thought maybe it could be more than a joke.

Emulsion isn't the designers' first counterintuitive wearable. Their previous product was a watch called Durr. Instead of a traditional watch face, it was a band with a colorful disc that vibrated every five minutes. The idea was to give the wearer a sort of haptic metronome---a baseline for comparing time as it passed on the clock versus time as we perceive it. They manufactured 1,000 and sold them all.

Having been introduced to the diverse frustrations of small-batch manufacturing with Durr, the designers are treating Emulsion as a prototype. Still, they'd love to make it a real product with the right partner. They're working on an idea for different models: One prototype uses a more viscous black liquid, which requires more vigorous activity to disperse. This version could be for athletes, they figure.

It's easy to dismiss an idea like Emulsion. Today, we give almost religious deference to numbers and data. An imprecise, ephemeral activity tracker seems like an oxymoron. Still, there are many ways to track activity that have nothing to do with counting. A sunburn can be a record of time spent outdoors. An aching back can indicate you've been sitting for too long.

Closer to home in the world of design, Emulsion calls to mind Live Wire, a famous installation created by artist Natalie Jeremijenko in 1995. Dangling from the ceiling at the Xerox PARC lab in Palo Alto (you know, the one where much of modern computing was born), the eight-foot cable fluttered around to visualize activity on the lab's network---the sort of thing we might use a gigantic flat screen TV for today. Both Emulsion Live Wire are subtle, ambient signals, but if there's anything consumer electronics needs more of today, it's subtlety and ambience.

Indeed, the designers describe Emulsion as an attempt to take a "Victor Papanek approach" to fitness tracking. Papanek, an influential design theorist, was an acerbic critic of consumer culture and mainstream industrial design. (Sample quote: "There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them.") Papanek, who lived for long stretches in developing countries and among native tribes, condemned what he saw as wasteful, needlessly high-tech solutions to simple problems.

In that spirit, Emulsion is a provocative reminder that you don't necessarily need a bunch of expensive electronics to tell you to get off your ass. In fact, an attractive, Pollack-like splatter of liquid---one that can be read at a glance, with zero interpretation---might be more effective than a step count or sci-fi doodle at directing your attention to your movement (or lack thereof). Emulsion probably has more in common with a sunburn than a Fitbit, but that's not at all a bad thing.