Deep Love of Coffee

Designer: Sunman Kwon

This design is to encourage people to drink the last sip of coffee by incorporating a cleverly concealed symbolic message, a slow strip tease of affection. I wish the journey into love could be as easy as the journey into the bottom of coffee cup. Or maybe caffeine could boost your energy to continue on the journey of searching for love.

Knife holder cutting board by Yar Rassadin.

Keeping organized and taking good care of products may have become big challenges for most of us in a culture of mass overconsumption. Commodity has become stimulus from which people seek certain pleasure, momentarily, and get instant satisfaction.

Design for '!' moments?

Should we designers focus on just creating aesthetically beautiful, functionally useful products, or ones give '!' moments, or putting design of a product in a much bigger image and much longer term? While promoting positive user experiences in daily life, maybe we should always keep in mind a 'what if' scenario might happen.

How typology is 'trained'

Design for Less

It seems that I can't stop talking about Chocolate these days. Who could resist the seduction of good chocolate (design)?

This is the winning design for Future Selves Awards. See more finalist designs here:

Finalist, Design for our Future Selves Awards 2007, Helen Hamlyn Centre

I can't stop asking myself: can we design for less consumption? How can we design for less consumption but long lasting emotional sustainable relationship with any product? How can we design for better well-beings if people's life and more positive social emotionality.

Chocolate Pencil Dessert

These chocolate pencils are the results of a collaboration between two genius designers, Japanese architect and designer Oki Sato and patissier Tsujiguchi Hironobu. Again, what excite me the most are the physical interaction and co-creation encouraged in this design, something that is rarely honored in nowadays design in my opinion. The subtleness of tableware (as evident as in most Japanese tablewares design) effectively displays the gourmet chocolate. The “pencils” come in with a variety of cocoa blends and flavors. The chocophiles can use the special pencil sharpener that comes with the plate to grate chocolate onto their dessert.

If your experience of learning to draw and sketch before becoming a designer is like me, i.e., sketching until head drops, the love and hatred emotions associated with the learning experience and physical interaction with pencil and pen sharpen must have been embedded deep in your memory. Thanks to the sweetness of this dessert, sharpening a 'pencil' has become a co-creating process and reward is of course the visually beautiful and tastily divine chocolate!

Chalkboard Napkin Rings by Joerg Gaetjens, 2004

Talking about sustainability. This design doubles as reusable place cards and napkin rings. You can simply write the names of your guests directly onto the napkin rings with the slate pencil and remove with the sponge eraser, both included. Made of lacquered untreated maple. Set of four.

What I also love about this design is that it encourages physical interaction with the product to fulfill a certain function, instead of the interaction mode of keyboard and screen. Doesn't the design remind you of your scrabbling-everywhere experience (if you remember) when you were small.