The Tea Tree - Day One

So I restarted the brief that I had done a little work for at the beginning of the semester, although I have completely re-written the brief and restarted it. So see the post before this one for the newly written brief.

Anyway, because I'm going with the whole organic, fair trade tea angle I wanted to have something to do with nature as part of the design so I started in the obvious place and got my sketchpad out for a few rough design sheets.

I'm going along the route of having the box that doubles as a dispenser so it's not just a box that you take the tea bags out of and put them into your own container. I wanted to make the box a sort of dispenser for the ease of the user. Tea bags with string run the risk of getting all tangled up together so by creating a box that dispenses one tea bag neatly at a time, it cuts down on hassle. The idea of the box having a sort of gauge on it so that you can see how many tea bags you have left is somewhat intriguing.

The angle that I'm going for here is to try and create a box using no adhesive whatsoever, using simple paper and tabs to hold the box together so that there is absolutely no part of the box that would be compromised when it comes to recycling. So I drew out some basic nets based on some of my design sheets. The only way to find something that works is to mock it up.

Okay so, breaking out the scalpel and the metal ruler, I first wanted to see if I could make a box using just tabs that would be relatively strong and hold together well enough. This was the result and it held together nicely. I made sure that the tab fittings were quite tight and it worked out quite nicely.

Going with the dispense idea again, I tried to make a box that had some kind of drawer in the bottom of it, which didn't workk quite as well as I would have hoped as I didn't really take into account that the drawer would have to be fractionally smaller than the box to be able to fit in and out. Plus, it could make the whole dispensing motion quite awkward.

And then I came up with this, a box made of two parts, but still only held together with tabs, that had a section at the bottom that pulled down to create an opening from which teabags could be pulled from the bottom of the stack so that they drop down the more you use. This one is the gold medalist of the three.