People who spend a lot of time around me quickly learn that I’m always observing silly little problems in the world and coming up with solutions. The observations and solutions are usually pretty good (my opinion, not necessarily what my friends think), but I am never in a position to affect the problem and so I end up just repeating the same rant every time we encounter it. To give everyone around me a break, I’m just going to clog up the tubes with my rants in this blog series and let my friends go on in peace.
First on the block is coffee lids. I’m talking those that you get at your cookie-cutter coffee shops (maybe others) like Starbucks and Caribou. Consider the cup & lid pictured below.
The problem here is the mouth piece. It’s designed to channel liquid out the opening. This may sound like a good idea, being that you’re going to drink out of this device, and getting liquid out is one of your primary goals, but my problem is that when I walk, the act of walking shifts the liquid in glass. Maybe it’s just me, but my stride seems to be able to cause constructive interference in a large Starbucks glass that amplifies the wave until it splashes out.
This invariably results in me burning my hand.
My proposed improvement to the lid is something like this:
This is a little hard to illustrate with my limited drawing abilities (AutoCADers out there, by all means, please lend a hand). The basic idea is that there is an indentation just below the opening to the lid so that splashing liquid will get redirected against the plastic of the lid as opposed to out of the cup).
With this design, liquid is still free to escape the cup when the cup is tilted, but the action of a quick splash is unlikely to have liquid leave the cup, and if it does, it won’t leave with much velocity to burn my hand.
I don’t think the change would add much to the production costs of the lid, and I think it could be done without affecting stability. But who knows, it’s just a dumb idea…
Tags: coffee lid, ouch
“The observations and solutions are usually pretty good (my opinion . . .”
You’re “special” morlok . . .
Yeah, you totally got marked as spam by my automatic filter dude. In the future try to post something more intelligent than the average viagra message
Via comment on this post on Facebook:
http://www.littlegreenplug.com/index.html
Apparently there are other approaches to solving the problem. The above is a plug for the cup. Hopefully, my idea would solve the same problem (thank Brian).
You should submit this to mystarbucksidea.com
Thanks John, I didn’t know about that site. I submitted a post, so maybe they’ll fix the problem.
The idea on the starbucks site is here.
Ingenious. Unfortunately, with something like this in mass production, I’ll have no chance of retiring early on account of another hot coffee spill civil suit
That’s ok. You’ll make your millions by selling your recipes, move into general home decorating, then get convicted of insider stock trading.
I just found your blog post when researching my own coffee lid design for a uni project. And as I have thought of various aspects of the design of these things for days I thought I’d put in my 5 cents.
Though a clever solution to your problem it has one major flaw – it can’t be produced with a single press die and would require more complex manufacturing process. Thus making this simple object a lot more expensive and thus probably impractical to make in batch quantities.
Thanks eero, it’s great to get feedback from someone who has some actual knowledge in manufacturing engineering. I guess the above production problem is what you get when a programmer does physical design work
I’d be interested to see what you come up with for your project.