Enameled Tea Pot
Dulton poetic challenge placed 1st out of 500 submissions
Dulton
2021
ROLE
Product Designer
DURATION
1 Month
BRIEF
Dulton, a Japanese houseware brand, wanted to expand into Beijing. Our task as designers was to create a product line that would ease the transition into a Chinese market.
SOLUTION
Understand Dulton's design language and brand identity.
Understand cultural trends and practices by potential consumers that would visit the Beijing shop.
Design a product line that merged these two areas to poetically expand Dulton's merchandise line.
Brand Identity and Design Language
As a team of 4, and, partnering with students from the Beijing Institute of Technology, we went through Dulton's catalog through the years documenting their evolution as a brand and creating boards to characterize their brand identity. These findings were put into a series of presentation slides that we shared before ending our collaboration with the Beijing Institute of Technology. Completing this part with students from BIT allowed me to start grasping the culture i would be designing for and allowed me to grow connections for when I would be continuing with the solo part of the project.
Color system analysis: we found Dulton's palate always had an accent. Either with a mixed neutral palatte & color accent or with a wood/ brown palate with dark accent.
Product color analysis: Here, we categorized the colors, materials, and decorative elements that dulton used into one board to reference when designing.
Looking at the products they have and running competitive analysis we identified areas that we could focus on when designing our product line.
CULTURAL CONTEXT
Tea ritual research
Looking at Dulton's product lines, I noticed a lack of beverage making products. I explored ideas of coffee, tea, or mixed alcoholic beverages and probed some of the Beijing students about what types of drink rituals resonated with them. The students I talked to described a ceremony known as Gong Fu Cha.
Methodology:
Diary Studies
Topic: Gong Fu Cha tea ceremony. Documenting with photos and text what each step of the ceremony means to them.
Students from Beijing
Students because with the constraint of time, students were the only group I had immediate access to.
Insights:
After talking to the Beijing students, I put 2 boards together to compare the Chinese tea ceremony with a common Japanese tea ceremony: Matcha.
Gong fu cha product set characteristics
Japanese matcha tea ceremony equipment and product sets.
IDEATION
Rapid Ideation - Low Fidelity Drawings
With all of my knowledge from the research, the first step was to create as many forms possible for this tea set:
Some of the initial sketches for the enameled tea set.
PROTOTYPING
CAD Ideation - Mid Fidelity Prototypes
Looking at the areas where Dulton already had product lines doubling as decoration, i expanded on an enameled set they already sold. I thought the uniqueness of material would provide a unique take on tea.
Existing enamel line in Dulton's product directory.
CAD models done on Rhino, Blender & Solidworks
Renderings of model in keyshot
Renderings of model in keyshot
OUTCOME
Final slides
The final slides submitted to Dulton for the competition
