Tea Emperor

This tipping teacup has been designed in Finland and it has gotten the prestigious Red Dot Design prize – but what a horrible trinket! I can’t see how any of the promised benefits would materialize. It’s definately not easier to clean when you compare to traditional ball. The ball you can pick up from the cup, open and rinse. With this tilted cup you end up with an awkward corner that is difficult to keep clean. Ok, now that this is out of my system I can say that it probably makes a nice gift.

IMPORTANT NOTICE

After reading what I wrote, my dear Empress asked me why on earth I slammed the tilting teacup. I must admit that it is an opinion of mine purely based on these few images and video. I have not held the cup in my hands, so I take it all back. But when I’ll get one then I’m surely going to write an user’s review on it. Until then, consider the cup as a gift item at very least.

Remember I have been looking for a convenient tea infuser with good design? Well, although not being my favorite, this one does catch my eyes:

Designed by Pablo Matteoda from Argentina, Sharky tea infuser has won the 3rd price in the “Beyond Silver” competition organised by designboom.

In designer’s own words:

INFUSION means to extract certain properties from an soluble ingredient such as tea leaves , herbs or fruit by soaking in liquid (water) until it gets saturated. So we can say that a infuser is the in charged of make this happen. This is a ludic point of view about the color given off from the phenomenon, wich makes more interesting the waiting of the whole process.

I like the idea and the way designer interprets the concept with. Comparing to many other tea infusers, this one seems more creative, original with distinctive style.

Unfortunately I do not plan to get Sharky tea infuser to my home. And if I have chance to try it out somewhere, I would rather use it with green tea than for example rooibos tea or any other tea with red tones in order to avoid a “killing shark in my cup”.

Maybe I still prefer to drink my tea with peaceful and soothing mind. That’s what tea is for me.

Designer’s blog is here

In HuaShan Culture Park , Taipei, the 1914 Connection Cool & Easy Tea is currently on exhibition until March 5, 2010. In this exhibition, a group of Taiwanese young designers born after 90′, present their design works around the concept of “tea”.  In contrast to the traditional tea ceremony and tea pots, their modern design transform the concept of tea into objects that bring sensation and joy to daily life.

You could find tea design in different areas such as designs for a conceptual tea house, tea snack packaging, tea leaves container and tea pots. The design tea pot above is called “Tea Bag”, quite interesting, isn’t it? I like it! Below is a fisherman fishing tea, lovely!

In addition, discussion forums on the topic of tea are held on every Saturday and Sunday during the exhibition, where experts from different field including literature, travel, food, yoga are invited to discuss and share their experience on tea. Some works in the exhibition also explore the relations and dialogues between tea and flowers.

Due to my current residing in Finland, I wasn’t able to see the exhibition in person. Thanks to the social network community I at least get to see some of the tea designs from Flickr.

Below is slideshow of photos taken by  Aeternitas. on Flickr, including HuaShan Culture Park in Taipei and some designs from Cool & Easy Tea Exhibition. Please, go have a look and feel the modern, young, fresh tea design from Taiwan.

More info on the tea design exhibition:

HuaShan Culture Park – Tea (in Chinese)

Other posts related to Taiwan:
New fusion kitchen? Taiwanese afternoon tea!
Taiwanese Bubble Tea (Pearl Milk Tea)

Other posts related to Design:
Hang your tea like hang your T-Shirt?!
Blomus – Loose tea infuser

DARKNESS

Winter in Finland can be very dark and cold, and some years it is also very wet. It is only natural that every now and then Finnish people need hot tea to keep warm and happy. Now with the daily cup of tea we can also get rid of that darkness, just look what a Korean designer brought to us.

LIGHTNING BAG

Lighting Bag by Wonsik Chae from Takashi Yamada on Vimeo.

RADIOACTIVE AND TOXIC

Think what you like, but to me it looks spooky. I have to admit that at first I thought that it is so beautiful, radiant and glowing etc. It didn’t take too long until the video comes to the point where the tea bag is lifted from the cup and dubiously glowing drops splash back into the cup and form brightly coloured streams. It is like witch’s cauldron full of toxic and radioactive sludge. Do you dare to drink something like this? Will it make your pee glow? What about eyes?

TEA TABLE LIGHT

One thing is for sure, if these tea bags become very common, it means dark clouds to the skies for tea table light manufacturers.

I can’t help smiling when looking at this novel design. Indeed, tea bag doesn’t have to look like “the tea bag”, and It can literally be any shape in your imagination, even better if you are able to put it into practice and make it into an interesting design item, like this one:

It’s not just design for design’s sake. As we tea-drinkers have all experienced: where to put the used teabag is sometimes problematic. I don’t know about you, but I myself often use tea bag more than once, therefore the idea of hanging teabag like hanging T-shirt on the rim of my cup is really intriguing! Although in practice it might apply better with taller cup than smaller one?

In any case, the hanger and tea-shirts look so cute that I am pretty interested in getting my hands on them. Just need to figure out how and from where. I will post more info here if I find them.

What do you think? Do you like this tea design? Would this be useful for you?

Designer: Soon Mo Kang

Information and image source from YANKO DESIGN