Morphological Exploration of the Turkish Tea Glass for Engaging Design Solutions

Abstract

This paper discusses the pedagogical approach followed for an educational project focusing on engaging design solutions for tea glass sets in the Turkish context. The project aimed at incorporating local values, usage patterns and rituals to enhance user experience and user-product interaction, reinforce product value, meaning and longevity, and develop more engaging and sustainable solutions. The project was conducted in collaboration with a major glass manufacturing company and involved 28 junior year industrial design students. Eighty preliminary and final design solutions for tea glass sets were analysed. The approaches that students adopted for addressing engaging practices and sustainability were gathered under tea drinking practices, tea serving practices, and marketing of the tea glass sets. The strategies followed by the students to differentiate their designs included analogies and historic precedents, body proportions, contour lines, differing inner and outer walls, axial asymmetry, visual and tactile patterns, and atypical typologies.