Harmony
Project partner: Syhyin Wong.
Harmony tea set and you, gathered.
Harmony was designed to keep all of your tea making tools together, helping you focus on enjoying a cup of tea.
Learning.
Before aiming to improve the tea drinking experience, we set out on exploring new environments and places. Meeting and talking to people who are passionate about tea.
Opportunities.
Two key opportunities arose from our research:
1. How do we simplify the tea making process and unify all of the tools needed to do so?
2. How might we encourage people to sit down, relax, and enjoy a cup of tea?
Sketching.
Our first round focused on developing unique interactive and visual methods of making, enjoying, and storing tea.
Top 6.
Refining our ideas down to a few strong ones for further pursuit.
Playground moved forward because it best focused on the relationship between tea and tea consumers most.
Top 3.
Focusing even further in, we developed further around the concept of Playground.
Key learnings.
Critiques mentioned Factory is too automated, while Playground feels too cute.
Feedback mentioned that possibly incorporating both Factory and Playground, we could find a sweet spot area for our final direction.
To pivot or not?
We developed mockups based on our top 3 results to resolve key details and functions, asking ourselves, did we need to have a deeply assisted design or not?
Not to pivot.
We pursued non-pivoting to preserve the relationship between the user and sense of belonging. Most importantly, tea is the star of the show.
Getting closer…
While this set possessed good overall direction, it felt unfinished and lacking the level of refinement we sought for the experience. So we went for the final push.
This is it!
While designing for an alternating tray that allowed multi-directional interactivity we found that having everything on one platform simplifies its geography and integration of heating technology. Solving the last crucial detail.
Tea Kettle and Teapot CAD refinements for 3-D printing.
