A questionable design

Background. Being first is never easy and generally means less for more. Same here. Joe was the first to graduate from my lab and we made up traditions as we went, including the one that students will get a trophy from me. Only for Joe, this was in the middle of us setting up shop in Geneva and not having access to all the tools others would later. Yet. What could be more fitting than a first trophy that represents exactly this: a first time for everything, a suboptimal setup, and quite a bit of uncertainty on how to proceed? Joe was the first to explore the concept I got funding for, the idea that the topography of molecules could help us with their organization. I was quite convinced that it could work, but never imagined how well it eventually would. It is a testament to both Joe's creativity and persistence that we eventually would unearth an entire world of self-assembly. While the design choice was correct, initially almost all experiments to get these systems to assemble failed. Not only the core design mattered but how you put things together, too. And Joe was key to this success. I wanted a trophy to represent exactly that, design and experiment, thinking and doing. And it should be funny somehow, British funny that is. Joe and I share love for dark humour. Lastly, it should represent us doing our first steps as an independent lab. I remember how Joe and I flew together from Oxford to Zurich for his onsite interview. We were both situated in Harry's lab (him doing his MSc, me as a PostDoc) and I wanted him to see our future lab. So there we were at Heathrow airport, me the soon-to-be young PI, him the potential candidate in our Sunday dresses and drinking pots of tea. I shot a picture of that moment and Joe has kept it as his twitter profile for years.  It set a beautiful tone for our lab's culture, doing the things, yes but doing them our way, centered on creative people. Fun, tea, originality, good design - that was the brief.

Sculpt. While thinking on what the first ever trophy could be and how we could make it happen with the resin printers not operational, I got reminded of a fantastic book on design (Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things) and, more importantly, the book cover. It featured a variant of the Coffeepot for Masochists by designer Jacques Carelman (from the Catalogue d’Objets Introuvables) and it immediately spoke to me. It represents a pot where the spout is facing the wrong way, making it essentially a (at least) hard-to-use piece of equipment. I liked it because it takes a while to see what is wrong (the design is so well ingrained in us). It is inherently very funny but teaches us a lot about breaking ground, principles of good design, and that sometimes flaws are only seen when doing things. Converting it into a tea pot was relatively easy (just add a tea bag, basically). It could be printed on a FDM filament printer (so doable in our current state) and we did have red filament around. It is not an easy print because of all the curvatures and overhangs but that again spoke for it being an excellent fit. Because it is hollow (with Lid!) and printed from ABS it technically it can hold hot water. whether you should use it for your daily Cuppa is another business. All that was left to do was to repurpose a tea bag to let one of Joes saddle forms to steep and voilà: #1 was born.

Colors. My first British tea pot was red, the one on the bok cover is red. It had to be red.

Sculpts: Maxon Cinema 4D, Printables
Slices: PrusaSlicer
Print: Prusa MK4,  Prusament  ABS red
Paint: all natural :)

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