Group 22

Design gives an object life; Use gives it soul.

The final piece is a tea cup with a transferred short text on its surface, it visualises the relationship between the user and the tea cup.  Actually like the tea cup, there are many rich and invisible contexts (it may be a memory or it can be your personal identity) behind every commonly used objects, which connect with users tightly and sensitively. It is about a long-term interaction and communication between users and objects, it is a process that users give a design its meaning or soul, and it is related to emotional design. We want to emphasize this process through the final piece, emphasize the importance of emotional design and users’ role in emotional design.

This special cracked glazed tea cup has been used for five years, We transferred a brief text on the surface of the tea cup, which is “I enjoy in holding and observing it in my spare time… This is my cracked glaze tea cup, the more times I use it for drinking tea,  more widely the cracked mark will spread. I expect to its changes after every time I use it, sometimes, I even drink tea for seeing more changes on the tea cup’s surface…”

It tells about how the owner uses it, what kind of mood the owner have when she uses it and how the characteristic changed the owner’s using habit of the tea cup. It visualises the relationship between the user and the tea cup. we want to emphasize the importance of emotional design and users role in emotional design through the final piece.

As so far, we are happy with this tea cup as our final piece, but we still think it still has improvement potential, so we will work in a group and try to find the best way to convey our manifesto clearly and strong.

The text need to be transferred on the surface of tea cup:

I enjoy holding and observing it in my spare time… This is my crack-glazed tea cup. The more I use it,the wider the cracked mark will spread. I expect to its change everytime I use it; sometimes, I even drink tea for seeing more changes of the tea cup.

Set the light together, and we took photos with three different people who have different using habit of lip stick, the shape of the top of the lip stick is totally different.

According to our manifesto, “Design gives an object life; Use gives it soul.” We tried to find out the relationship between users and daily objects. Then we were thinking about users’ fingerprints that usually left on daily objects. They can show different personal usages, but it is quite hard to be seen by naked eyes. After a group discussion, we decided to represent this concept with invisible ink. Following this, we chose teapot and teacup as main objects. The main reason is those fingerprints can be seen on the teapot and teacup with UV light. On the other hand, it is just ordinary objects without UV light. This would fit our manifesto, which can show the relationship between users and designed objects.

We are thinking about what objects we use everyday except tables and chairs. Then we thought of lipstick. Each of us use lipstick especially ladies, but the usage is different for each person. People with thin lips sideways, thick lips’ people prefer to draw circles when they using lipstick, others will using in a vertical angle and slowly put lipstick ground into flat, there are some very professional and discerning ladies who prefer to use a special brush to smear mouth, then the lipstick will form a groove in the middle. The same lipstick, different people will leave a different mark, these different imprints, also give their souls.