Hasta La Ideas

Aside from anomalies like Tigere Chiriga’s Floating Mug, I don’t see a lot of design focus on the shape of glassware as it pertains to function. But here are a couple of ways in which the actual form influences the usage in some non-obvious ways.

During my stint as a bartender I was taught a quick trick for chilling a pilsner glass: You stuck it inside the ice bin, so that ice was both inside and outside the glass, and spun it with your fingers until it was chilled. *(If you’re going to try this at home, read the warning at the bottom of this entry.)

However, the pilsner glass was only served with bottled beer; guys ordering drafts got beer steins. And there’s no way to apply the spin trick to a stein, as the handle precludes rotation. So you had to pre-chill steins in the ‘fridge behind the bar, which only had room for five of the bulky things amidst the other crap you had to keep in there, so only the favored regulars got chilled steins.

I doubt any glassware designer will interview a bartender or server—but I wish they would. The martini glass in particular is badly in need of a re-design. I feel they got knocked over the most and they were the worst things for a server to carry on a tray.

Recently, a University of Bristol study revealed the shape of a glass actually influences how fast people drink what’s in it—if there’s alcohol involved. As reported in The Economist,

[Study participants were asked] to do one of four things: drink beer out of a straight glass; drink beer out of a flute (a glass whose sides curve outward towards the rim); or drink lemonade from one of these two sorts of glass. To complicate matters further, some of the glasses were full whereas others were half-full….

…[Researchers found that] a full straight glass of beer was polished off in 11 minutes, on average. A full flute, by contrast, was down the hatch in seven, which was also the amount of time it took to drink a full glass of lemonade, regardless of the type of vessel. If a glass started half-full, however, neither its shape nor its contents mattered. It was drunk in an average of five minutes.

Researchers surmised that the reason lemonade was drank at the same pace irrespective of glass shape, is because people are simply drinking it naturally. But the beer times differed because, according to the researchers, people are aware they’re drinking booze and are trying to modulate their intake. The fluted glass throws off people’s perception of volume; in other words, they cannot accurately estimate when they’ve hit the halfway mark.

Should the study see widespread exposure, bar owners might be interested in selecting glass shapes that will more quickly move product.

*(Warning about the ice-submersion glass-chilling method: Managers routinely frowned on this practice, because if you were not careful, you might chip the rim of the glass while inserting it in the ice. Meaning now you’ve got a shard of broken glass hidden in the ice that’s potentially going to be served to someone in a drink. Whenever a glass broke anywhere near the ice bin, at my bar it was standard practice to then dump hot water down the ice bin, melt all the ice, search for a broken shard with a flashlight, and get the barback to refill the ice bin—a seriously time-consuming pain in the neck.)

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That there is the Plus Fours Routefinder, the precursor to the roadbook and an interesting (if ultimately failed) example of pre-ID industrial design. Invented in the UK, the wrist-mounted device provided user-advanceable mapping information at a glance.

The central design difficulties are obvious: A separate scroll was required for each point-to-point trip, which allowed no deviation. It was also unidirectional, meaning you’d have to load a new scroll for the return journey.

The device was on display as part of the British Library’s “Weird and Wonderful Inventions and Gadgets” exhibition several years ago. The Mail Online theorized that the device never saw mass uptake not because of its flaws, but because it was invented too early; that there were reportedly not enough motorists in the 1920s to support mass manufacture. I’m not sure if I buy that—you’d think that if the device had merit, one patient businessperson or another would’ve trotted it back out as the number of motorists rose.

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With nearly half a million dollars in funding and just under five days to go, Lorenzo Maggiore’s BUG-A-SALT is on track to be IndieGoGo’s most lucrative campaign ever. It’s been making gizmo / gadget / public-interest-story rounds for over a month now, since it launched and quietly went viral to the delight of the blogosphere and the nearly 10,000 backers looking to take pest control into their own hands.

Suffice it to say that Core need not co-sign to help Maggiore—who is not a designer but a Santa Monica-based visual artist, by the way—cross the threshold.

But what is it that makes the BUG-A-SALT so compelling, a runaway hit as opposed to a shot in the dark? Is there a darker subtext to the fact that unmistakable typology of a lethal weapon has been adapted for home use to be a palatable (no pun intended)—if not altogether playful—solution to a household problem?

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Man and condom have been locked in a bitter struggle of begrudging codependency since the beginning of time (or sometime in the 1920’s). Latex may have got tougher, lubricant may have got lubricantier, but we have seen surprisingly little noteworthy product or packaging innovation, short of the occasional rubbery ridge or a mildly disconcerting flavouring.

‘The One Handed Condom Wrapper’—brainchild of London based designer Ben Pawle—could be the long awaited answer to fumbling lovers’ cries across the globe, and is, perhaps, the biggest coup for seamless love making since the days of bra burning.

Taking aim at the impractical impenetrability of contemporary condom packaging, Ben’s foil wrapper redesign imagines the contraceptive being applied with the use of a single hand—opened, quite literally, with a click of the fingers. (Check out his video after the jump)

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In the spirit of Hipstomp’s clarion call for clarity, we’ve got some oldie-but-goodie images of meme-y screen-based optical illusions. A new-ish iPad/iPhone app called the Chameleon Clock jazzes up the time with the so-called ‘transparent screen’ effect, which is achieved by setting a highly site-specific image as the background image of a display.

Say hello to Chameleon Clock—a big, bold, beautiful clock for iOS. Chameleon Clock blends into your environment by using the camera on the back of your device to either sample the colour of whatever is behind it or, play a live video feed.

Toggle the time display between black & white to match your device with a simple tap and change its transparency with a swipe up or down—anything from jet black and pure white all the way down to barely visible for a more subtle effect.

Tap the mode icon in the bottom left hand corner of the screen to switch between Chameleon Mode where the background colour of the screen is constantly updated to match whatever is behind it, and Live Camera Mode where the background becomes a live video feed.

Cult of Mac notes that this feature might eventually go native: “Apple applied for a patent which described how they could add a ‘wild new dynamic screen saver system that could sense the environment it is in and in a chameleon-like fashion automatically change the screen saver.'”

The developers behind Chameleon Clock cited this April 2011 roundup of variations on theme (via Flickr) as the inspiration behind the app.

Owen Billcliffe

Hit the jump for a couple more…

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