Stirring Cup - Making users' habits effective...
Without a stirrer or spoon available, coffee or tea drinkers often resort to swishing the glass/cup/mug itself around and around, hoping to agitate whatever's not properly mixed. However, these glasses are all round, so there's not really any feature to shake things up - instead, you get "laminar flow," which is a fancy term for "nooo mixing." In this design, however, "some French students" (the most complete reference I can find for this one!) have taken the natural tendancy of users and made it effective - by adding a heavy ball in the bottom of a glass. When the user swishes the glass, the ball rolls around at a different rate than the liquid, busting up the laminar flow and mixing things up quite nicely. When a design takes a natural tendancy of the user and makes it work, well, that's about as good as it gets! Kudos to you, "some French students."
[via Dame de Comer & The Design Blog]
6 comments:
Now think about how hard this would be to clean, and that having a heavy marble in all of your cups isn't going to be entirely practical. Spoons, then? :D
Ooh, interesting - and an important point, that product design needs to consider all parts of a product's life, not just the beneficial ones! Personally, I envision the "heavy marble" as a completely separate part, to be tossed in the dishwasher's silverware basket along with, well, the spoons - wouldn't that cleaning then be just as easy as the status quo?
Yeah, after posting I realised that the marble would actually be a seperate item. Nevertheless, my initial comment about cleaning it stands: While it might not be a big issue with a dishwasher, for those who still do their dishes in the sink, irregularly shaped glasses are somewhat of a nightware to clean!
Nevertheless, I like the idea, I just don't feel it's 100% practical.
Interesting blog, by the way. I came across it while looking around for one that focussed on new computer/desktop-interface ideas, but decided to sign up because you covered an good range of topics as well. Incidentally, I never found a blog that did *just what I wanted, but then I found out there really wasn't all that much research going on in that area. Not nearly enough to warrant a blog, at least.
You're right again, Michael - even if the ball is a separate part, that's something that'd sure be easy to drop down the drain when washing by hand! As for your search for material related to computer/human (physical?) interfaces, I agree that that's a fascinating subject that isn't covered nearly enough, either by products or press. It's the bottleneck in the whole situation, right? You can think faster, and the computer can process faster - it's just the darn mouse and keyboard that are slowing things down! Let me know if you find anything on the subject...
This is turning into more of an IM-conversation than just comments, heh. Anyway, I personally think physical interfaces aren't the problem as such. While the keyboard isn't ideal (qwerty/azerty being layouts devised for typewriters, based largely around avoiding the 'arms' that propel the stamps onto the paper must not get in eachothers way), it's still a much better interface than those that most mobile phones suffer. And I'm quite fond of the mouse for interfacing with a pc, especially one with extra buttons. I also have a tablet (for illustration purposes, but it's a very capable replacement of the mouse in its own right). And then there's the recent news that Windows 7 will support system-wide multi-touch, making it profitable for companies to start coming up with their own multitouch-hardware (Windows having a larger installbase than its alternatives). I'll admit to still being easily excited by multi-touch, heh.
Anyway, I was mostly interested in alternatives to the desktop/file browser/window managers that we're used to. between Windows, mac and Linux, there are very minor differences, and sadly not a lot of innovation. I'm really interested in projects like Symphony OS (http://symphonyos.com/cms/) and a few others whose name I've forgotten, but it seems that there's not a lot happening in that area of design. A few mockups, a few betas, and otherwise a whole sea of win/mac-alikes. I'm especially surprised by the lack of innovation in file-managers, as I would think finder/explorer wouldn't really be such fantastic examples to copy. That's just me ranting, though, and maybe I do have slightly unrealistic expectations of Linux, wanting it to be easier to use at the same time as wanting it to innovate.
You're right, this comment thread has strayed far from the original topic (something about a tea cup...?), but it's interesting stuff, so it's all good! You're totally right that everything that's available in desktop interfaces is depressingly similar - as you called them, Win/Mac-alikes. And that Symphony OS looks pretty cool, it seems to have some promise - and hopefully some of those prototypes and mockups of radical new paradigms will find their way into the mainstream!
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