E-Lift Tea Saucer
By deconstructing the ritual sense of the "Kung Fu Tea" culture in the Chaoshan area of China and combining it with the traditional Chinese reception culture, we redesigned a tea saucer for playing with and sparking discussion.
Time
2020 Sep - 2020 Dec
Type
Product Design
Position
Beijing
Product
Research
Choose a Ritual: Drinking Tea
In this class
BUCT - Design Laboratory
Contemporary Rituals
Design in the domestic landscape
We discover Ritual around us
We observe objects around us and the live we live in. By clarifying how design around us create new, exciting or historical rituals, support existing ritual, uncovering lost ritual, we can find special, brand new, undiscovered way to make our live better and more convinient.
Explaining Why
In this section, I would like to explain why we finally chose Drinking Tea as our target ritual to start our design journey.
Tea is Simple Now
Starting from 4700 years ago, tea should be the oldest drink in Chinese history. It is also now one of the most popular drink in China.
Nowadays tea drinking is simple: if you want to drink your own tea, what you need is just a bottle of hot water and a tea bag or a hand of dry tea leaves. What you need to do is drop your tea into the hot water and wait for 30 seconds.
When you entertain your friends with tea, the process will be a little more complicated: you need a teapot for brewing tea, a teacup, and a strainer. When you pour the tea from the teapot into your friend's cup, use the strainer to filter out the tea dregs in the tea, and your friend will get a cup of clean tea.
Tea used to be complex
But when we researched the ancient Chinese tea culture: articles, paintings, historical relics, etc. of that time, we found that drinking tea was a very formal, sometimes solumn rutual in ancient times, especially when entertaining friends. Ancient Chinese have 21 standard procedures, and there are many books and even paintings that specify the standards.
We continued to study and found that this complex tea drinking and entertaining ceremony came from the difficulties of ancient transportation. The only means of transportation in ancient times were carriages and boats, and the time for travel between many regions was as long as half a year or even a whole year. In this case, two friends from different regions may only meet two or three times in their lifetime. In order to express the importance of this precious meeting, there is such a set of rituals to tell friends: I respect you very much, and I cherish the time we spend together.
Rediscovering the tea culture abandoned by modern life
Now in modern society, transportation is developed and communication is convenient, so this ritual for receiving guests has been gradually abandoned.
However, we found that this complex ritual has been preserved in Chaoshan Area, southern China, as a way of hospitality for modern Chaoshan people (a region in the south): among the 21 steps, there are many tea utensil designs that are exclusive to this ritual. We think this is very interesting to bring it to modern product design world and decided to explore this amazing, historical and rich cultural ritual - Tea Drinking.
Finally, we decided reconstruct tea drinking concept
Brainstorm & Mindmap
Brainstorm
connecting related keyword for Design Concept
Mindmap
Design logic and keypoints help us generate design concept
Concept Development
Painpoint
Communication that is too easy makes itself lose Worthless.
Concept
Not only functional, be interesting.
It is encouraging you to start a conversation with your friend.
Talking, but not in Real Life
We found that the current excessive and overly convenient social interaction has caused people to lose interest in socializing.
This is especially true for Generation Z youth: people can talk about anything online, but are not willing to talk in face-to-face settings, and awkward silences and embarrassing situations often occur.
Conversation Opener
E-lift is not only a tea servicing tool on table, but also a starter of conversation.
Your friend will be curious about its reasonable but strange appearance on table and ask you:" What is it?". Next comes a serie of questions: "How to use it?", "Why you want to buy it?", "Can you show me how it work?".
Special Utensils: Starting from saucers
After a detailed research about Kongfu Tea Culture in Chaoshan Area in China, we collected all special utensils.
We plan to revive the whole serie of utensils. For our project, we decided to choose the most simple one: The Saucers as the beginning of our design.
Sketching & Prototyping
Start with hand guesture
If we want to design an interesting object, we must ensure that the interaction between people and it is interesting.
For the tea saucer, the interaction between people and it lies in the process of picking it up, so the gesture of picking it up is very important. We decided to start from the gesture and deduce the appearance of the product.
The most interesting one
We conducted a very simple user survey and the final results showed that the structure in the lower left corner of the above picture was the most interesting.
So we ran into Prototyping
We conducted a very simple user survey and the final results showed that the structure in the lower left corner of the above picture was the most interesting.
Sketching
Modeling
Mock Up
