March 24, 1983

MOST new clock designs amount to little more than a modified face on a modified case. But over the last decade a new type of clock has appeared in which design, as much as time, is of the essence. These are the designer clocks in which new graphic, kinetic, sculptural, sound and light features have assumed a strong importance, sometimes at the expense of clarity. Most of these clocks are handsome; some are difficult to read. They range in price from moderate to expensive. ''Clocks now fall into the ashtray and salt-and-pepper shaker category - all designers have to design one,'' says Kipp Trafton, the owner of Sointu, a shop on 69th Street near Madison Avenue. But designers are looking not only at the clock face and case; they are also reconsidering just what it is in the movement of a clock that shows that time is passing. Some designer clocks are new ways to tell time - so new that such old-time expressions as clockworks, clockwise, counterclockwise, around the clock and the sweep of time are anachronistic.

Spring arrived this week, and at the Institute for Advanced Study, the season seemed lost in thought. Even in a place well known for producing fresh ideas, it has been an especially fertile and, at times, esoteric academic year. Dr. Robert Sleigh, for example, a philosopher from the University of Massachusetts, is here for a year reassessing the work of Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, a 17th-century German philosopher and mathematician who believed the universe was the result of a divine plan. ''If you were looking for candidates for the best minds in the Western world, he would be on everybody's list,'' Dr. Sleigh said. Meanwhile, Dr. Piet Hut, an astrophysicist from the University of Amsterdam, is studying the effects of interlopers in binary star systems. That is, he wants to know what happens when a single star comes into contact with two stars that are revolving around each other.

Consumer prices, pulled down by a record decline in gasoline prices, fell two-tenths of 1 percent in February, the Labor Department said today. The decline in the Consumer Price Index, helped by stable prices for food and housing, was the second in three months and brought the inflation rate for the past 12 months to 3.5 percent. The official rate for 1982 was 3.9 percent, which was the lowest since 1972. In the New York-northeastern New Jersey area, the price index was unchanged in February. (Page D2.) President Reagan said in a statement, ''Today's inflation report brings more good news to American wage earners and consumers.'' He said the report ''confirms once again that we are putting inflation back in its cage and that our economy is on the mend.''

An obituary of George Kramer yesterday gave his age incorrectly and misspelled the names of two survivors. Mr. Kramer was 76 years old and among the survivors were a sister, Rose Fiegel, and a brother, Edward Kayett.

In 1981, when the first signs of a subsequent, two-year profit slide began to appear, Levi Strauss & Company responded by setting up an in-house venture-capital fund. The company, the maker of Levi's jeans and the world's largest apparel maker, offered a dozen competing teams of middle managers the lure of a $500,000 budget to come up with new product ideas. The budget, and the right to pursue the idea, would go to the team with the idea that senior management considered the best. Like many recent ideas at Levi Strauss, the experiment appears to have paid off: the winner of the competition, a prewashed denim jean with leather patches and copper rivets called ''Two-Horse Jeans,'' is expected to register $20 million in sales this year after its 1982 introduction.