Sorapot has been out for half a year now, and many of my customers are designers, artists, engineers, and other creative people. You’ve given me extremely valuable feedback on my design, but I’ve always been curious to see your thoughts expressed the way you usually express them: visually. With the holidays here, a Sorapot Art Contest seemed like the only way to go.

To enter: create an image inspired by Sorapot.

• Your image can be a sketch, a painting, a photo collage, a rendering- anything that can be reproduced as a 1024 x 768 JPEG.
• The only rule: your image must visually represent Sorapot in some way- the teapot doesn’t have to be front and center, nor does it have to be photo-realistic, but it must be there.
• Email your image to contest@sorapot.com by Sunday, December 14th. I’ll post all images in a gallery here after the judges choose a winner.

The judges:

Michael from Design Notes
Jean from Notcot
Scott and Matias from Behance
Harry from MoCoLoco
Tina from SwissMiss

The prize: A signed, dated, and mirror-polished Sorapot delivered to your door, just in time for Christmas.

The resources:

• For high-res images of Sorapot to get you going, just visit the press pictures page. Feel free to use these images in any way for this contest.
• For those about to render, I salute you! Sorapot as a: Solidworks assembly (zip), Parasolid, IGES

If you have any questions, just shoot me an email. I can’t wait to see what you guys create!

Today Sorapot is featured as New York Magazine’s daily Best Bet. A big thank you to Rima Suqi, who I met at the NY Gift Fair.

I just received a shipment of new Sorapots, and opened ordering once again. The most exciting part of this for me is the feedback I’m going to get as more people use their Sorapots for the first time. Since Sorapot was just a sketch in my Social Psychology 135 notebook in college over two years ago, I’ve wanted the experience of using it to be more like reading a short story than operating a tool. Now that Sorapot’s an actual product, it’s exciting when others experience and then re-tell the story in their own words.

This week Elijah Nicolas, a commercial pilot and early Sorapot customer, posted a detailed unboxing of my design to his blog. It’s a strange, wonderful feeling to read how he interprets a project into which I’ve sunken so much thought over the last two years, having only encountered the physical endpoint of all my theorizing and revision. He shows how single points of contact with the design- the box’s texture, the scroll format for the instructions, the teapot’s finish and weight- add up to form an overall narrative. Elijah’s Sorapot unboxing

Heather Ann Snodgrass did something similar with her recent article, “Brewing Sorapot” for Behance. She contacted me with basic questions about challenges I’ve faced, how I manage my time, etc, to which I gave excited, yet basic answers. As you’ll see when you read her article, she wove these disparate points of information together into a story that richly summarizes my path with Sorapot, current thinking about design and entrepreneurship, and plans for the future, in a way that I never could. Brewing Sorapot

My friend Piers Fawkes has an insightful trendspotting blog called PSFK that’s one of my daily reads (although I still haven’t figured out what the name stands for). He recently interviewed me about how Sorapot was launched through design blogs, why hustling is critical for independent designers, and why stainless steel might save the world. Here’s an excerpt:

Joey, We’re fascinated with your tenacity. We must have met at Likemind over a year ago and it was there you told me about your new kettle and there still seems to be much buzz about it. How did it all start?

It’s actually been about two years since I started sketching ideas for Sorapot in college, and I had originally intended it only as a portfolio piece to snag an internship after graduation. Somehow a blogger for CoolHunting found my site and posted Sorapot. You can still see the original post (and original design) here.

Other blogs, including Gizmodo, picked up Sorapot on the same day, and I started getting emails from individuals and retail buyers asking about price and minimum order size. This was my first encounter with the power of blogs as a marketing tool, and with the idea of producing and selling my products on my own.

You can read the rest of the interview here.

When I think of design at Princeton I think cerebral architecture, but in two weeks the university is hosting a conference about making design accessible and useful. They invited me to speak about sustainable industrial design. I plan to discuss how design that anticipates patina is the most sustainable; something like my post about how New York City handles rainfall. It’s a start, but I think I can go deeper with the conference’s “design for non-specialists” theme. Any suggestions?

The conference is March 1st and totally free. You should come! Register here.

I’m showing Sorapot (plus some new concepts that haven’t made it to the site yet, but soon will) at the NY Gift Fair this week. I’m sharing booth #3704 in the Accent on Design section with two other very smart designers: Carrie Solomon and Verena Schreppel. The fair runs from February 2nd to 6th at the Javits Center, 655 West 34th Street in Manhattan.

It would be great to see you there- let me know if you need a guest pass.

I just got back from two weeks in Asia, my ideas about design and manufacturing much changed. Check back for a longer post, but for now:

The first 300 Sorapots have found owners, and I’m working to have a second run ready for the spring. A tremendous thank you to those who placed orders. If you’d like to be notified when pre-orders start for the next run, shoot me an email: joey@joeyroth.com

As you’re reading this, I’m probably reading Purple Cow and flying to Asia. I’m visiting the workshop that’s making Sorapot, ensuring that the first 300 are perfect, and getting the glass teacup started. But I’m also going to be in three wonderful cities over the course of two weeks! If you or someone you know wants to get together while I’m there (20th-23rd for Shenzhen, 24rd-26th for Hong Kong,27-29th for Tokyo), shoot me an email and we’ll grab a drink.

Receiving an object as a gift rather than buying it for yourself drastically changes the object’s meaning. As I wrote in my post about charcoal toothpaste, everyday products are sponges for meaning. A gift comes with a built-in story, a communication about your relationship to the giver that will color every interaction you have with the object. Like every product, the more practical the gift, the more you’ll consider its function, rather than its underlying story. That might be why money is rarely given as a gift, except to children - it’s so practical that it leaves no room for this communicative kind of narrative.

Like the difference in air pressure on either side of a ship’s sails, gift giving maintains a productive asymmetry in a relationship. The imbalance isn’t just a monetary one, although the gift’s value factors in; it’s more an expectation that the receiver’s gift will communicate as much investment and insight into the relationship as the giver’s gift. This is where gift dissonance comes in: since gift giving is a communication that reveals the giver’s conception of the receiver and the relationship, to accept a gift is to accept an identity. The more specific the gift is to the receiver, the more dissonance is created during the exchange.

This dissonance can be positive or negative. If a friend gives you a gift that doesn’t fit with your identity - a vase, although they’ve never seen flowers at your house, for example- you’ll be forced to either take your friend less seriously or change your self-concept to match your friend’s. You could also refuse the gift, but most people go with the first option. If your friend surprises you with a gift that’s so specific to who you are and is something you actually want to use, you’ll also experience dissonance- this time from the mismatch between how well you thought your friend knew you and how well they actually know you, as shown through their gift. To mitigate this dissonance, you’ll consider the giver a closer friend.

Fear of getting someone the wrong gift, and forcing them to mitigate the resulting dissonance by taking you less seriously, leads people to go with gifts that say very little- gift cards are the best example. However, safe gifts preclude the possibility of creating positive dissonance as well, which is why they make the worst gifts for close friends. The best gifts communicate the most information. My friend Jean has been writing about non-safe, wonderfully communicative gifts for the past week at Notcot. The core77 gift guide is a good source as well. And of course there’s my teapot.

photos via Pingmag

It’s snowing in Brooklyn today, and I was thinking about the indoors. I’m interested in products that could retain their functionality if made portable, but are specifically designed to stay inside. Clocks are the most common example- a watch does exactly the same thing as a wall clock or grandfather clock, but people still love these larger objects. Even now that the watch’s function has completely dissolved into the cell phone, many people still wear them.

Hulger has based its entire product line on our desire for home-specific objects. They describe their handsets as ergonomic and radiation-free in comparison to cell phones, but it’s clear that their value comes from making the phone less portable again, tying it to the user’s cognitive picture of his or her home.

I think this goes back to the concept of the hearth as a mediated instance of fire. The home reflects things that exist outside its walls, on a smaller scale and in a form that the owner can control. I think that people strive to make their homes feel different from the largely uncontrollable outside world. Products that say “I belong at home, and I make your home your home” will always be critically important to the house trope, and thus desirable - even if their functions are replicated by smaller, portable devices.

Pooja: What particular challenges do you think designers face these days?
Joey: Designers still buy into this story that they’re artists and need to leave marketing and production to “business” people. This mentality is why products are boring and harmful. The internet allows designers to crawl further up the supply chain than ever before and to sell directly to customers- more of us need to do this.

Pooja: Please tell our readers your concept of using stories as the sketches for designs?
Joey: The beginning of my design process is describing the object verbally, thinking about the kind of plot development it would enable in a story, and especially thinking about how the human characters would feel about it. Only then do I start extruding shapes in Solidworks.

Pooja:What is innovation to you - design, technology or the creative processes itself?
Joey:I think innovation is curating the chunks of information you pick up from daily life in a smart way.

Just follow this link for the entire Design Blog interview.

Thank you for your great responses to Sorapot’s design. Many of you have asked how to make tea with and clean Sorapot. It’s this simple:

Sorapot instructions from Joey Roth on Vimeo.

Start by holding Sorapot vertically and unscrewing the thumbscrew on the bottom of the rear arch. Releasing the tension will allow you to swing the thumbscrew and tension rod out of its socket. The spout section will now detach from the tube easily.

Rotate the spout section all the way back until it touches the tabletop. Sorapot will now support itself as you add your favorite loose tea into the open front end of the glass tube.

With the tea inside, close the arch and tighten the thumbscrew in its socket. This creates a watertight seal between the front of the tube and the spout section. Once you’ve tightened the thumbscrew, place Sorapot on your tabletop and add hot water through the funnel-like spout.

With high quality tea, there’s no need to open Sorapot and replace the leaves after each pot that you make - just add more water through the spout and enjoy the unique character of each subsequent steeping. The mesh filter between the front of the tube and the spout keeps leaves out of your cup while allowing them to circulate throughout the entire tube. This gives them plenty of room to unfurl, enhancing your tea’s flavor.

When you do want to remove used leaves and clean Sorapot, open the arch once again and fully remove the glass tube. The tube can be placed in the dishwasher while the metal parts should be washed by hand.

I hope this was helpful - please let me know if there’s something you’d like explained in more detail by leaving a comment below.

Back to Sorapot

At the beginning of this month, designers submitted environmentally sustainable clock designs for a competition and auction. The auction will benefit Trees for the Future, a reforestation group, and the competition is sure to draw people who want to talk about design. Spring and Thwart Design are the hosts, and I’m one of the judges. It would be great to see you there!

The event is tonight, November 16th, at 6:00 pm. Spring is on 126 Front Street, Brooklyn, NY:

View Larger Map

Sorapot has been my biggest project since I learned about the existence of industrial design and switched out of my English major almost four years ago. What you see above is the final design. This is one of the first, done when I knew a lot less about Solidworks:

I stayed with the sheet metal construction for a while, even adding an improbable glass lid:

Sorapot forced me to learn more and more about manufacturing, and its design evolved with my understanding:

Finally, with some great advice from friends and collaborators, I decided on ancient but subtle investment casting (lost wax), and arrived here:

Stay tuned for updates on availability!

Thank you for all of the feedback on my felt mouse, which everyone seems to be calling Plushy Mouse. Instant feedback from people who think hard about things like computer peripherals is invaluable. It’s clear from blog comments that this guy needs a scrolling mechanism and a clear power source. I’m not, however, making Plushy any less boxy.

Here’s why: if you look at how you’re holding your mouse right now, you’ll see that the only contact points between mouse and hand are the tips of your fingers. Nobody smothers the mouse with the entire surface of his or her palm- movement would become sluggish and uncomfortable. Yet mice are designed to look like they fit snugly inside a your palm because people believe that’s how mice are held. This makes the mouse seem more ergonomic, when in fact a rectangular box is just as comfortable to manipulate, and a felt box even more so.

I’ll post the updated design here as soon as I finish. Stay tuned!

The felt’s softness and plyability makes the mouse comfortable without looking cartoonishly ergonomic.

The button layout follows the golden rectangle.

The package’s pearly finish and color suggested the toothpaste inside.

I knew this was charcoal toothpaste, but this plume of shiny gray still surprised me when I squeezed the tube for the first time.

I liked how elastic the stream of paste was compared to standard toothpaste. Unlike my pal Michael , I also liked brushing with it - the taste wasn’t too sweet, the foam was unusually thick, and spitting out blue-gray foam at the end was somehow satisfying. It’s actually the best toothpaste I’ve ever used, but not for these reasons. The physical experience could have been completely different and I would have still loved it.

Here’s why: I first saw pictures of the toothpaste on DesignNotes, then contacted Kathy about scoring some. It was a few days until we were able to meet. When we did, we ended up sharing beer and ideas and becoming better friends. I think waiting in line for an iPhone, hearing a song from a friend’s band before anybody else, or even saving up for a product you wouldn’t normally buy has the same effect. Narrative is like a codec for storing and playing back memories, and people seek opportunities to build small stories in their lives. People judge products that are unremarkably easy to acquire on how well the thing works, rather than on a story they’ve built around it (if a product is super-easy to acquire, that ease could be a story itself).

It’s also toothpaste made from charcoal, a gorgeous material that’s hard not to love.

burnt chaise lounge by Maartin Baas

Steven Heller is a critic, author, and design thinker. He’s worked as an art director for the New York Times for over 30 years, and also writes book reviews and obituaries. Last week, a retrospective exhibition of his work opened at the Visual Arts Museum in Manhattan. Inspired by the wonderful interview he just did with Gothamist, I wanted to know more about him, and his ideas for graphic design’s green potential. You can find this very same interview on Treehugger.

Joey Roth: What did you want to be when you were 10 years old?

Steven Heller: A PR person in the Air Force. Who knew?

JR: How does your current work as an author, educator, and design thinker feel different from art direction?

SH: No big difference, really. I still have to “direct” things. And being a “design thinker,” if indeed that’s what I am, is what all art directors must do. If they don’t think, they got nothing. The only difference is I don’t buy illustration anymore. That’s a bit sad.

JR: As the production of design becomes more and more decentralized, do you think criticism becomes more important?

SH: I don’t think one has to do with the other. Criticism is important because it gives us a language (indeed a lens) by which to discuss and view design. And since design is all around us and serves so many roles, we need to address it from with sophistication. Criticism may help.

JR: What about graphic design, as opposed to other design disciplines, moves you?

SH: I like all design disciplines, I just happen to be rooted in this one because that’s how I began. But what I love about graphic design is its immediacy. I guess the web has taken over there, but graphic design can be made quick, produced quick, and reach a lot of people. It also becomes landfill quick. Oh well.

JR: The green design message has mostly been broadcast to architects and industrial designers. How could graphic designers make their work more sustainable?

SH: The sustainable mantra is definitely in the graphic design arena. It was loud a clear at the AIGA NEXT conference, and AIGA has inaugurated various initiatives too. Funny CNN is apparently doing a green week, so their CNN bug is green. Maybe that’s the most some designer can do, maybe they can actually specify materials that are friendly to the environment. Maybe, but just maybe, they turn down jobs that will defeat the goals of sustainability.

Mr. Heller is currently the founding co-chair of the MFA Design Department and founder of the MFA Design Criticism Department at School of Visual Arts. His retrospective runs through December 1st at SVA’s Visual Arts Museum, 209 East 23 Street New York, NY.

Tea ceremony tools, specifically their call-and-response relationships with nature, have always influenced my designs. I love that they’re built with binaries; a permanent iron kettle used with a bamboo whisk that lasts for only a month of normal use; one scoops aggressively green powdered matcha tea with a matte, earth-toned and humble spoon. Reflecting nature with conspicuously human-made objects is a nice contrast itself, and the one I tried to emphasize even further with these designs:

The matcha spoon is traditionally a piece of steam-bent bamboo with a flattened end for scooping. I love the simplicity of the shape, but wanted to see the green matcha powder splayed on a different surface, so chose unglazed porcelain. I made the screw that holds the two materials together stand out, preventing the spoon from seeming too sleek or luxurious.

I built this bowl from two off-center circles. As the bowl’s lip goes higher, the thickness of the wall gets thinner, creating a subtle pouring edge that will make drinking directly from the bowl easier. The variable wall thickness will also make the bowl warmer at different points.

A Corian and stainless steel whisk for preparing matcha in the traditional way:

The first Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was my favorite movie for a long time. Something about a self-sustaining world that thrives within the mundane world, yet has a completely different feel and set of rules, has always appealed to me. I don’t think I’m alone; architecture developed first to provide shelter from rain and cold, but evolved to contain and enable these small worlds. Courtyards, bedrooms, and parks are all shelters from normative behavior and experience. Although we can’t step inside, I think products provide the same kind of shelter by offering a unique set of practices and expectations that differ from, but exist within, everyday life.

This is also how I understand the goal of branding, and some brands build very good shelters. Apple and Muji are the most obvious- their collections retain compatibility with the outside world while offering a complete and meticulously designed alternative. In contrast, brands like H&M and Boffi, while successfully pushing modern object design , rely on external meaning and don’t have looks of their own.

Molo is a lot smaller than Apple and Muji, but the world they weave with their products is one of the richest of any industrial design team I’ve encountered. They draw sparingly from trends and owe more to the forests of Vancouver than any single design movement. One could live quite a happy life in the closed loop of Mololand.

Their Float teacup pinches a membrane of whiskey between a sphere of ice and similarly shaped inner wall:

A gentle tunnel springs up from collapsible paper Softwalls:

Although Molo. Apple, and Muji share a love for cleanliness, a design’s closed or open foundation doesn’t need to imply a specific aesthetic. Ross Lovegrove’s and Olivier Theyskens’ work are just some closed-world designs that have complexly detailed looks:

Some products are more like mirrors than shelters, emphasizing and re-forming bits of culture, but blank when there’s nothing to reflect. Where Molo’s closed-loop work is quiet and thoughtful, these ice cream cone pendant lights by Mixko are clever and literal:

Mixko makes the Heli belt, which I wrote about for TreeHugger, from tatami mat off-cuts:

They love to play with scale and re-purpose everyday shapes. Here’s a phillips Posidriv head screw (thanks Shelby!) turned into an ashtray:

To “get” Mixko’s design punchlines, you have to be familiar with common shapes and cultural tropes. Unlike Molo and Wonka, their message is incomplete without the wider world, but this close interaction with culture allows Mixko to work humor and subversion into their object design in a way that’s tough for closed-loop designers, myself included.

Smokestacks behind a metal gate, enforced isolation is a major part of Wonka’s factory. “Nobody goes in, and nobody comes out” isn’t really true though- the whole movie is pretty much about finding Wonka’s successor, adding a drop of input from the outside world in order to keep the system running. I don’t think Wonka was the first Wonka, but rather one loop in a very long cycle, in which Charlie will be next.

Closed loops are never truly closed, they just filter inputs far more rigidly. They can draw from any period in time, which gives them a far larger pool from which to filter. Closed verses open is really a matter of speed: open loops respond faster to the torrent of culture than closed loops, which only seem closed in comparison.

I designed this carry-on luggage to articulate the lost romance of air travel.

The design also pulls from the golden age of ocean liners: the black lacquered finish will become beautifully scraped and chipped as the suitcase travels with you, revealing the bamboo plywood beneath. The patina will develop with each trip you take.

The wood bar serves as a carrying handle when closed. It unfolds, using simple 45-degree angles between bars and rotating joints, to allow the user to roll the suitcase.

The interior has four drawers with bamboo bases and soft felt walls. The bottom drawer is sized for laptops. Instead of unpacking your clothes once you reach your destination, the carry-on suitcase functions as a very livable wardrobe while you’re on the go.

Designer Joey Roth created his new teapot, available this fall, with sustainability in mind. All parts are recyclable, and pigment and paint free. The packaging on which instructions for use are printed is made of unbleached, recycled cardboard.

Will Roth’s customer appreciate such touches as much as they appreciate the product’s utility? He thinks so.

“As the situation with the environment becomes more serious,” he says, “I see a trend toward small and mindful products.”

The end of summer still makes me think about school. This is the second end-of-summer since I graduated, and even though it no longer signals the start of class for me, I wonder if it will ever lose the association. Already though, the association is changing: when I was a student, the start of autumn meant scheduling seminars, moving my computer, and remembering how I had left things with friends. Now it conjures viewbook images of brown leaves falling on sunny campus quads, students- now a group that I think about rather than belong to- carrying their books and leading study groups near old stone bell towers. I unconsciously transformed Labor Day’s meaning from a set of personal tasks to a common trope, in order to save space. I no longer deal with information related to being a college student daily, so my mind compressed the intricate structure of relationships, appointments, goals- basically, the interface I had built to interact with life- into a story-like memory.

Objects also come with a history of information that’s no longer relevant to their everyday use. They retain design features that were functional in some other context, but now serve as reminders. Even pens, one of the most purely utilitarian products around, have design cues that were once functional, but now just tell stories. Maybe the oval pattern on this “Vision” pen by Uni Ball represents the speed of your thoughts hitting paper as you scribble with this black and chrome ink missile. These shapes would make sense cut into the surface of an engine as air intakes, but they tell a story without context on a pen.

Think toys: most depend on features that imply a function that the toy itself can’t actually perform. Some would say this is what separates toys from non-toys; I believe it separates good toys from bad. The value of Barbie’s Jeep comes from reminding a kid (or parent) of a real Jeep, while being small and slow enough for a kid, and pink enough for a girl, to drive. The gnarly treads, fog lights, bumper and grill were technologies that dealt with the Jeep’s rugged environment, and were completely functional in that context. The Power Wheel Jeep doesn’t do as well in its functional context – helping a little girl explore a park or her yard with a friend - because it apes the look of these features, not their functional spirit.

While real cars inspire the Autmoblox cruiser at right, the toy’s value comes from its building-block design that encourages reinvention. Its headlights, spokes, and treads are taken from real cars, but they’re simplified riffs that belong to no specific model. Most importantly, the cruiser’s shape serves the designer’s intention, and each feature can be justified in the context of creative play.

Just as I remember my time at Swarthmore through compressed narrative because I’m no longer actively engaged with student life, design that doesn’t encourage thoughtful interaction has to reference existing, widespread tropes for meaning.

MocoLoco recently asked me to write about my five favorite spots in New York. “Favorite” is tricky when my choices go to the front page of a top design blog; the list was a chance for me to tell a story about myself as a designer, so while I picked places I really do love, I designed the list to be a five-part narrative that would make sense for people who had never encountered my work before. I wanted East Village ramen, an intense design museum, and Japanese selvedge denim to create a small world. I just wish I had included the 7 train.

From its beginning at Roosevelt Avenue in Flushing, the elevated line bobbs through Queens and under the East River, then bisects Manhattan at the island’s middle. It’s a slow rollercoster ridden by Chinese and Mexican grandmas, and like less and less of New York, its beauty is unintentional.

Last week I was invited to preview the MoMA Store’s fall/ winter collection. Like their current spring/ summer collection, the products they showed were smart, playful, and only vaguely articulated the season. The buyers seemed to be particularly into monochromatic colors, geometric patterns, and use of materials that pushes the boundary of manufacturing, in a few cases subverting accepted material applications.

This Stone Chrystal stool/ table by Marcel Wanders encapsulated the feeling of the collection more than any other single piece. Essentially a large glass vase turned upside-down, the stool’s structural strength seemed to come from the triangles embossed on its surface, which also bent light and translated anything viewed through the stool into an impromptu pattern. While it’s a stretch to call the piece seasonal, the glass could have been carved from a block of ice, and it could be compelling (or horrible) if stuffed with a tangle of Christmas lights.

For her Lotus Lamp, Jane Kyttanen also puts a familiar material – nylon in this case – to an unexpected use. Her lamp depends on the plastic’s soft translucency to create the impression of a lotus blossom with a glowing core, and is “printed” directly from a 3D computer file by way of a rapid-prototyping process.

Naoto Fuksawa’s restrained chair uses bare aluminum and washed-out wood to channel a snowy day at the beach.

While I don’t usually write about jewelry, these vegetal silk and silicone pieces by Tzuri Gueta were impossible to ignore. The designer pushed molten silicone through woven silk tubes, where it cooled into those wonderful growths. I loved how the necklace’s complexity was unforced, and resulted from such a simple action.

Unbeknownst to me, Paola Antonelli, director of MoMA’s design department and a wonderful design thinker, reviews every product that’s carried by the design store. As one of the buyers told me, the MoMA store isn’t really a museum shop; products are design to be sold, so carrying them as a retailer is often more true to their narrative than displaying them in a gallery.

For more than half a millennium, France has been the world’s laboratory for Western style and design. Despite being home for designers like Philippe Starck and Ora Ito however, France hasn’t kept up with countries like Japan, Italy, and Sweden as a leader in furniture and product design. Deputy Trade Commissioner Elizabeth Puissant admits that “when one thinks of what’s new and what’s now, one does not necessarily think immediately of the French.” In an effort to expose French designers who “continue to evolve, create, and innovate,” the French Embassy Trade Office hosted Créativité: Made in France, a small showcase of French furniture designers, at the Les Migrateurs showroom in New York.

At first glance, the pieces seemed more Rococo than Moco. Geometric inlays, floral details, and a focus on craftsmanship all articulated France’s ornate design heritage. When I looked closer though, I found a consistently honest use of material, without sulfurousness finishing, and a nice melding of traditional detail with clean, modern construction and shapes. One of the strongest pieces of furniture (literally) was this brass and lava stone table designed by Joel Caturla and created by La Forge de Style for the Catherine Lagot showroom.

Ornamentation is definitely coming back, but furniture like this marble table by Taillardat is tricky- if you saw it in your grandma’s house, it would look like it belongs there. The seating, also by Taillardat, seemed to be even more informed by tradition. There seemed to be a spark of modernity hidden in each of these pieces though, whether in its proportions, colors, arrangement with other objects, like cushions. Again, because I was searching so hard, I could have been finding modernity where there was none. The build quality was gorgeous though, and if they were upholstered with more inspiring textiles, could have been a good taste of design’s near future.

From the Taillardat website:

Lighting:

These lamps were far more modern, and worked very well in the same room as the ornate chairs and tables. The Mercer Lamp at left, designed by Henry Personnaz, used two layers of shading; the bulb seemed to hang within a ghostly cylinder as it gave off soft, even light. The center Tribeca Lamp, also by Personnaz, was easily my favorite piece from the show, its shade made from thinly spaced pieces of aluminum that gave the uncanny impression of transparent brushed sheet metal. At right, the contrast between glass, concrete, and direct, unshielded light in the Alchemist Lamp by Nicholas Furrow add up to the perfect counterpoint to the plush, embellished furniture.

Donald Albrecht, a design curator and former architect, concluded the event with a lecture about cultural cross-pollination between Paris and New York. Between the two wars, he said, New York borrowed heavily from Paris’s style, while Paris borrowed skyscrapers and jazz from New York. His exhibition will start soon at the Museum of the City of New York.

A real quickie: I chatted with Jim Wicks tonight after his presentation as part of the Tech Epoch series at the Japan Society. He’s the design director for Motorola, dealing exclusively with small, networked cell phones that want to shed their physical forms and become no more than a set of behaviors as soon as technology will allow.

We design very different things, but I realized that treating the shoes, teapots, and other non-electric things I love as if they were networked devices could produce designs that are particularly sensitive to their environments. Although these products are silent, they’re connected by the user’s daily experience; the things a person uses or encounters each day become nodes in a very tangible network. Like colors on a painting, no product exists in isolation, although they’re often designed as if they do. More on this idea soon.

I’ve been busy with some fun projects, but there are many smart, busy people who keep healthy blogs, and I should be able to do the same. Starting tomorrow, at least one post per week that will make me, and hopefully you, think.

Here’s what I’ve been up to:

I helped organize a Design Blogfest during ICFF/ design week, and people got to play with the first Sorapot prototype. I don’t plan to wash off the numerous fingerprints it collected on its glass tube that night.

I presented two new designs (more images on the main site soon) - a rolling suitcase and a felt computer mouse - at a talk organized by Maxwell of Apartment Therapy, also during design week. I loved the work of fellow presenters Jason Culler and David Oliver.

I started writing about green design for Treehugger.

The first 1,000 Sorapots are being investment cast- this is a blank.

My Moka Pot got included in the “Coffee Stories” section of Space, a Chinese design magazine. Can anyone read what they wrote about me? Red Dot also featured Totemo again, which won their Design Concept award in 2005.

Also, my friend Jean just launched NotCouture: love at first sight.

Last night I went to Cooper Union to see Adam Greenfield speak. Adam is a very smart guy whose way of framing people-object interactions is always exciting for someone who designs physical things. He spoke about the “dense, complex love” that people have for cities, why this love is turning to apathy, and what designers can do to make cities lovable again. The talk was called “The City is Here for You to Use: Urban Form and Experience in the Age of Ambient Informatics.” The title points to the part of the talk that was most meaningful for me: the city considered as a product with many users. If you didn’t get to go, check out Trebor Scholz’s great summary.

I was completely engrossed by Adam’s critique of spaces that are hostile by design, the subsequent popularity of escapist devices like the iPod and cell, and how the same (and new) technology can be used to restore a sense of engagement with the city. He never resolved one central question though: if the city is a product for us to use, is it a tool or a toy? Does “good design” here mean ease of use or joy of use?

For a city, I think the two are exclusive – easy-to-use systems are successful if they’re cognitively invisible and forgettable. They free the user to think about other things by disappearing and functioning silently; microwaves, nutritional supplements, and the software update feature in OS X are examples. People don’t form emotional bonds with these systems because they’re forgettable by design; tools whose value comes only from the outcome they produce for the user. A city’s tools are the highways, airports, chain stores, etc. Borrowing a term from Rem Koolhaas, Adam called these unremarkable, function-driven places “junkspace”. He lamented the fact that public places, particularly the streets, are becoming tool-like junkspace: optimized to move traffic instead of foster interactions between neighbors. Yet a few minutes later he praised Naoto Fukasawa’s idea of “design dissolving in behavior”. Isn’t this the goal that leads to junkspace? Design that “gets out of the way” so things can get done with a minimal investment by the user.

Should we use ubiquitous technology to make our cities so easy to use that they become invisible? I don’t think this is what Adam wants (it’s definitely not what Naoto wants), but this seemed to be the logical conclusion of the systems he proposed. As the internet makes location less and less a part of doing good work, living in dense, exciting, expensive places like New York becomes more about using a toy than using a tool. Kevin Slavin, one of the panelists, addressed this shift by saying that stories about the city, rather than more factual information, make spaces lovable.

When I was trying to think of parts of the city that could benefit from less noticeable, more tool-like design, the subway came to mind right away. While New York’s subway is impressive in many ways, it’s cars grind and shutter as they move, schedules are basically meaningless, and its tangled pathways of colors, numbers, and letters are confusing. The layout and textures of the stations themselves are from another era, with drippy black ceilings and platforms that ensure you’re never more than a few steps from sudden death. Yet the subway’s quirks are one of the things I miss most when I’m away. Understanding it, being able to ride without holding the rail, getting frustrated when neophytes don’t move in enough, giving people directions- each is a sign of membership, and each would be meaningless in a perfectly efficient, easy to use tool of a subway system. The subway, like the city, is more a toy than we imagine.

To be clear, the tool/ toy dichotomy is not a judgment of a product’s utility or design merit – in fact I think each of my designs falls strongly within the “toy” category. It’s instead a way to talk about and categorize the goals that informed the product’s design.

- Mies Van Der Rohe

When Mies says “specific characteristics”, he’s probably talking about engineering properties. I wish he had gone further; designers need to understand the psychological and spiritual factors of the materials themselves. What connotations and emotions, separate from engineering properties, do materials carry?

Ambergris

Quiet luxury, antique, windy, maritime nature, 19^th century America/ 16^th century Italy, refined decadence, whale cultures (Nantucket, Japan), salt, dryness, sunlight, fog.

from ambergris.co.nz

Ambergris is a sperm whale secretion that begins as viscous liquid floating on the sea. The sea and sun season the liquid so that it gradually congeals and hardens into tight, waxy lumps. Ambergris smells like sweetened isopropyl alcohol and bleeds slowly when punctured. Ambergris is used for perfume, it’s very expensive, and could completely change the feel of a simple wood chair or cabinet if used as an inlay.

Gold

Mesoamerica, round tastes, weight, potential energy, fat, nighttime, chocolate, red fabric, depth, indulgence, warm stone, fire, bass tones.

gold pills by Tobias Wong

Despite all this, gold is completely neutral in the body and is one of the cleanest conductors of electrical signals. I want to design a solid gold hotplate just for melting chocolate.

Bamboo

Precision, coldness, East Asia, bright rusticism, book-smarts, impermanence, speed, high notes, celibacy, asceticism.

Bamboo Bike by Calfee Design

Right now, bamboo is enjoying popularity fueled by its beautiful similarity to natural wood. It can grow up to a meter a day in seductively frilly groves, and it’s natural tube shape affords all kinds of smart designs.

Leather

Horn instruments, traditional luxury, tobacco, control, mid-tones, mediated sexuality, street-smarts, warmth, ambition.

From sharp business bags to motorcycle gear, leather strongly connotes agency and control. It’s traditionally tanned by fermenting raw animal hides in urine until the hairs fall away, then pounding them with a paste of brains, lye, and dog or pigeon dung. I wonder how this intense process could be articulated through the leather product.

Concrete

Competence, aged cleanliness, damp morning, commitment, impersonality, moss, possibility.

Concrete makes me think of Tadao Ando’s austere yet bright and open architecture. It’s strong and heavy but has an unassuming feel. When concrete is poured into a mold made from wood boards, it takes on the grain’s texture. If tannins didn’t cause it to leach into water, I would have used concrete for the porcelain parts of Sorapot.

Products begin as stories the designer wants to tell, problems the designer wants to solve, or both. Materials translate the designer’s intended story into something the user can understand. Plastic’s ubiquity has made this even more true- users notice when designers talk to them through material selection because deviation from plastic is so rare.

I’ve argued before that every object engages users in a kind of unspoken dialogue. The product’s look and feel is a message that the user decodes according to culture and memory. Then the exchange of meaning reverses: the user signals intention by manipulating the object.

Like interactions between people, every dialogue between user and product can be framed as an exchange of power as well as meaning. Products like erasers and hammers submit to our intentions, while cell phones, books, and subways make us submit, either by seduction or force.

This seduction/ force dichotomy gives us a second dimension for mapping a product’s temperament. Some products are designed to be invisible (gentle), others to make themselves known (rough). So we have:

• Dominant, Gentle: These products limit your action possibilities to make the interaction easier or more efficient. A result for the user, unencumbered by the experience of using the product, is usually the designer’s goal. airplanes (for passengers), hospitals (for patients), automatic coffee machines, portfolio websites

• Dominant, Rough: These products are challenging and restrictive to use. The challenge can be positive, in the case of games, or negative, in the case of public transit. The deciding factor is intention: was the challenge part of the design or the result of a designer who didn’t care? the subway, digital cameras, home alarm systems, games
  

• Submissive, Gentle: Submissive, gentle products are usually the goal of ergonomic, ease-of-use driven mainstream industrial design. hybrid bike, shower, iPod, Photoshop, MP5

• Submissive, Rough: Products that do what you want but let you know they exist. If I had to only design within one of these groups, submissive and rough would be it. pre-modern tools, LEGO’s, chairs, tables, beautiful / uncomfortable shoes, blogs
  

Don Norman, one of design’s most influential theorists, used three teapots to represent the distinction between visceral, behavioral, and reflective design. There’s something inspiring about an object designed for such a specific, simple purpose. Any vessel that pours in a tight stream, insulates the user’s hand from heat, and filters leaves qualifies as a teapot, which might be why there’s so much diversity in their design. Like chairs and lamps, the teapot is a chance for industrial designers to articulate their DNA. These are some that have inspired my own design work:

Dresser is one of the first designers to work directly with mass production. I don’t think any designer has been able to negotiate the tension between ornamentation and simplicity so well since. The thin dark wood handle, visibly bolted to the metal, is my favorite part of this teapot, which still looks fresh more than 100 years after it was designed.

The Mingei movement in Japan gained momentum a decade after Dresser and existed in reaction to the onset of mass-production. Shoji Hamada, a prolific Mingei ceramicist, made this piece. My first impressions of these products was that they are rustic, functional, unpretentious; minimalism striped of its shininess, as if pure, strong-lined objects were washed, perhaps left for too long in the dryer, and folded over the course of many years so that the edges begin to fray and their whiteness turns more earthy.

Molo design is Stephanie Forsythe and Todd MacAllen, and their Tea Lantern is the most functional teapot I’ve encountered. It looks like a precise piece of lab equipment and uses a vacuum chamber to keep tea hot and cold liquids cold, just like a thermos. Float really is a teapot drilled down to its functional requirements, and is visually the opposite of Hamada’s pot.

This moka pot by Richard Sapper isn’t for tea, but its too good a design to not mention. Sapper replaced the traditional moka’s clunky shape and threaded closure with a restrained stacked-cylinder construction and elegant snap-shut closure. The tiny spout that manages not to drip is one of my favorite parts- if only he designed for tea.

Designers tend to encase these new products in sleek, aerodynamic shells that seem optimized to reduce wind resistance rather than to provide a platform for thoughtful interaction. The lack of a history of use associated with new technology, combined with the major onset of NURBS-based CAD software and new developments in thermoplastic injection molding make these shapes relatively easy for designers to articulate, and may cause designers to “default” to this futuristic-aerodynamic style, which has come to mean “I am technology” and, perhaps, “don’t put your coffee cup on me.” If these products were instead designed to fit into and enhance their individual contexts- working reliably on a desk or accompanying the user as he or she moves from place to place- their meanings for the user would be more specific and richer, functioning as a guide to the best mode of use.

I’ve loved tea long before I knew what industrial design was, originally because coffee was forbidden and cocoa was too sweet. It’s still my favorite drink. Leaves, hot water, and a teapot or cup combine to form a complete universe, which you then get to drink up. Tea can also be a pursuit, and people who love tea fill the empty space left by its simplicity with discussions of paraphernalia, technique, and taste. Below are my favorite tea websites, kept by people who know a lot more about the drink than I do:

The Simple Leaf: Nikhil left consulting to start an online teashop with his dad. His blog focuses on Indian tea, which I need to learn more about, and his unpretentious approach to tea as an everyday drink is refreshing.

I met Lawrence when I asked for a design crit for Sorapot. He’s a doctoral candidate living in Beijing. He writes about his adventures with aged puerh, a kind of Chinese compressed cake tea, and his blog is part travelogue, part tasting journal. Even though puerh isn’t my favorite tea, I read Marshal’s blog daily because he’s such a good storyteller.

TChing is a collaborative tea blog started by Michelle and Sandy, and it’s another daily read for me. I love that “design” is one of their primary themes.

While not strictly (or even mostly) about tea, Tastespotting is a wonderful site. My friend Jean launched Tastespotting this month to see how the visual sharing interface she developed for Notcot.org would work for a community of passionate foodies.

Tea Tour NY, my friend Kiki’s blog, is about tea culture in this exciting city, as the name suggests. Kiki hosts a monthly tea group, and her appreciation for tea as a social gathering point comes through in each of her posts, even the recent one about Yixing teaware.

Phyll Sheng seems to approach tea as a cipher to be decoded. His posts are super technical and a lot of fun to read. As a noobie, I especially appreciate the range of different teas he explores. He also writes for TChing.

I used to think of boxes as bread used to carry some interesting spread to your mouth. I didn’t have any packaging in my industrial design portfolio because I lumped packaging with other “support” items, like a domain name and clever business cards, that make a product possible, but aren’t “purely” the fruit of design.

Last night I worked on the packaging design for Sorapot. Designing the box forced me to think more about the teapot’s shape than I had when I imagined it unpacked, sitting confidently on someone’s table, ready to make tea. Michael Beiruit describes the processes of speechwriting and graphic design as taking a “complicated bunch of ideas and reduc[ing] them to their arresting, memorable, engaging essence.” Beiruit could easily be talking about any creative process here, but his quote captures packaging design so well. A good box summarizes a product’s most conspicuous features through a very limited vernacular: a flat sheet of corrugated cardboard.

Sorapot itself is a package though; literally a holder for tea, but also a package for the tea ritual’s network of meanings. I designed it to emphasize green tea’s stand-out features, like unfurling leaves and bitterness that comes from boiling water. Sorapot’s designed around the shape of the tea ritual, just as its box is designed to hold and support its shape.

According to Phaidon, Minagawa doesn’t follow fashion’s seasonal cycle treadmill, believing that garments produced for a specific season in a specific year will become “useless junk” (Tsuzuki 2005). His approach to fashion design is similar to (ethical) product design in that he strives to create durable pieces, both in terms of their construction and trend-independent aesthetic merit, that can be worn for many years. He works with local dressmakers to manufacture his garments.

Perhonen means “butterfly” in Finnish, and seems an appropriate mascot for the brand as a whole because of the butterfly’s airy, feminine, and natural qualities (Minä comes from Minagawa). My first impression of Minagawa’s work was that it stood in opposition to the FRUiTS-style ultra-cute, constructed, and somewhat jaded look that’s associated with Japanese street fashion. His designs are feminine, young, and perhaps cute as well, but in a substantially different way. There’s a thoughtfulness and restraint that seems to inform each of his garments, expressed through a quiet appreciation for materials, careful use of color, and respect for potential wearers. Minagawa’s use of patterns and sketchy embellishments makes his garments youthful and light, but he completely avoids the irony often associated with child-like graphics on clothes for adults. His cuts and hemming make some of his designs almost too precious.

Mina Perhonen looks each seem to evoke the border between two seasons and emphasize the fluidity of one season changing into another. This skirt, jacket, and turtleneck seem to illustrate the end of summer.

The long sleeves of the jacket and shirt and weight of the materials keep the wearer just warm enough during the onset of autumn. The jacket can be worn or left off, and the sleeves of the turtleneck are easily rolled up. The skirt’s olive-green color and vertical line pattern immediately remind me of late-summer grass. The turtleneck is patterned with solid polygons that suggest the changing colors of leaves that will soon fall or have already fallen on this grass; the leaf-shapes are positioned as if they were lying on a flat plane rather than attached to branches, and the turtleneck itself is positioned above the skirt, just as leaves form a layer over browning grass as they fall. The jacket is smooth and white, strongly representing the first snow that will cover the fallen leaves, which already cover the grass. As the temperature cools, the owner of this outfit will first wear the turtleneck with the sleeves rolled up, then down, and finally covered by the white jacket.

I love turn-of-the-century topographic maps that seem to be guides for foremen to change the earth somehow. There’s so much purpose communicated through this visual, objective measurement and cataloging of a landscape. The division of smooth hills and valleys into simplified steps makes it easier for a large group of people to talk about re-shaping the slopes.

Stepped approximations of hills exist as actual landscapes. These terraces were cut to grow vertical plants on hilly slopes.

The tension between landscape and human intention is the inspiration for this small teacup. It’s a caricature of a dammed river valley, its lines blurry like 19^th century dam photos.

I’m interested in your thoughts before I add this porcelain teacup to my industrial design portfolio and eventually prepare it for manufacturing.

Would you want to use it to drink tea every day or only when guests come by? Would you use it to hold coins and candies beside your keyboard? Let me know.

I wonder if every construction site in Manhattan (and there are a lot) thought they had hit a local main this morning. Ambiguous stimuli are easier to deal with if we attribute them to local, personal sources. How can we design products to leverage this tendency?

When a product tells the user a story through its design- a combination of materials, function, and supporting material like packaging- the user reacts to the product emotionally. The product doesn’t create the emotion, but instead triggers a set of memories, experiences, and beliefs that the user already has. Emotions are notoriously tricky for people to trace to a specific source, so the user may misattribute her emotionally positive state to the product’s function, thinking that it works better when in fact it’s triggering a slew of positive associations; the product’s function is the most local, explainable source.

photo from Gothamist

I love designing everyday things because it requires me to watch myself. I need to make the familiar, and thus invisible, processes that constitute a day foreign enough to wonder about and then to design for. Right now I’m working on a computer mouse and need to explore the physical movements that program functions normally obscure.

When anthropologists ran out of new tribes, they turned their discipline on themselves and found that familiar culture could be mapped just like novel culture; they had to consciously approached it as unfamiliar. Artists do something similar when they draw from life and force themselves to see the world as a splash of lines and tones rather than a series of objects with names, meanings, and history.

This is my design process, but causing the user to attend to an everyday ritual is also one of my major goals. I designed the Sorapot’s handle to transfer some of the tea’s heat. Not enough to be painful, but enough to be unignorable. The heat, combined with the clearly visible tea leaves and steam that rises as you pour, unpacks “making tea” into “filling, grasping, steeping, smelling, pouring.”

The responses were far beyond what I had hoped for.

This is by winner Yoh Komiyama from Japan. It looks like a clear, non-functional appendage that stems from the actual plug and takes its place when there’s no need for power. In the designer’s words:

Traditional Japanese people called an existing thing in this world “Utsusemi.”
“Utsusemi” is a cast-off skin of the cicada insect. The outlet which I saw was an empty container, an “Utsusemi”. An invisible soul (a transparent outlet plug) entered the container, and so it was reborn to connect the world.
When an outlet plug is pulled out of an outlet it lies like a cast-off skin without a soul.
But will it yearn for an outlet so?
“A cast-off skin” is based on this simple idea.

Komiyama personifies the plug like Adams personifies rabbits in Watership Down; they’re not humanized, but are given a human-decodable voice that articulates the experience of their species. I need to develop this kind of empathy.

.

So maybe physical smallness isn’t what gets me. Small spaces are somewhere between environment and product: they’re designed to be used instead of just inhabited and convey a specific, deliberate set of meanings. The smallness I love so much in a space might then be the small number of different ways it could be interpreted due to the richness and completeness of the world it creates.

Physical smallness is dear to me though; it moves me like dull unfinished materials, simple geometric handles, atonality, distortion, the flash of pain from hot wax. There’s a tendency among product designers to make things as easy as possible, to analyze how humans behave and then design things that tiptoe around that behavior without touching or constricting it.

The people who design womens’ shoes understand this- while they might not try to make these gorgeous specimins uncomfortable, the feeling of the leather pinching and abrading your flesh and the marks that this treatment leaves are a strong component of their appeal.