27/Feb/2011 Teasmaid

We have a project of designing a teasmaid for the modern world.


I have never heard of such a thing before, on the brief, it says 'the teasmaid is a product of a previous century', then I did a bit of research, I found out that it is a machine that makes tea automatically when the timer reaches the time the user sat. 

I was talking to Lee Tsz Yan about this product, we both agreed it is a bit useless as we can make a tea easily by ourselves and nobody wakes up in the morning and desperately needs a tea anymore, we need to brush our teeth first.


Is that the reason why this product is now disappeared and nobody of my age had never used or even heard about it?


What I'd really like to talk about, is that if designers can make an old concept come alive again.

I searched in my head for some examples. Now because I don't have very good knowledge about the history of design, I only have a few answers, the Mini Cooper, the Fiat 500, the Volkswagen Beetle. Weirdly they are all cars, and that makes it very different from the case of the teasmaid, because teasmaid has been proved to be functionally useless whereas people can't really live without cars since the Model T was introduced. What the designers have done to those cars, are that they have modernised them, to fit them into today's standard while kept the essences of their classic design elements. 

Can a designer make the teasmaid popular again by giving it better functions? Why coffee machines are so popular? I think that professional coffee makers make much better coffees, but professional tea makers make the tea to be no different from teas made by ourselves, however there are some obvious drawbacks about the teasmaid. First it doesn't add sugar or milk automatically, which means you still need to spend time adding milk and sugar. Second, you need to clean it everyday. Last, it makes noise when it is working. What we find here, are exactly the drawbacks a coffee machine has. It's not because of tea is a less popular drink either, because English people keep drinking teas. Now I am in a massive confusion. Why I want a coffee machine but not a teasmaid? I drink as much tea as coffee.





I am going to find it out by doing this project, hopefully.