A meditation on Cups
What does a cup do? To hold water? Can a cup really hold water? Let’s do an experiment with an off-the-shelf cup. Hmm… it holds water all right. How about 3000 degree molten iron?
What is the meaning of a cup? Is it a container that is round and cylindrical, with a handle? Hey there are square cups too. Is it something for people to pour drinks?
Why do people need to use cups? Can’t they use bowls instead? Bowls can hold water too. Why do people want to drink from a cup anyway? Can we take this bowl and pass it off as a cup?
How do we design the best cup, given schedule constraints? Can we adapt the design from bowls instead of making one from the ground up? How about from a spittoon? Can we just keep calling these things bowls instead? We totally copied the design from that bowl (and we have 100 pages of documentation to update to change the name…)
Why are cups often round and cylindrical? Is it the best way to make tools to hold water for drinking? Is it the best way to make tools to hold molten iron?
Who thought that having handles for cups was a good idea? The handles are a weak point. Need to put a big warning there to caution users. The first thing they will do is try breaking the handles. (that’s what we did when we first got a cup)
What happens if several cups are stacked together? Will it break?
What happens if 10000 of our cups are stacked together? Will it break? (Hey, don’t laugh. People totally do that!)
What happens if somebody puts molten iron in the cup? Will it burn safely?
What if we need to extend the design of the cup? Will it work if we made it 100 times larger? Will it work if we put 7 handles on it? How should we make an agreement with the packaging team so that their packaging will fit in these new designs?
We should prevent children from drinking alcohol with our cups.
How do we design the cup-handle interface so that it will fit any standard handle with minimal effort?
Can the cup be used to kill people? Well, yes…. but is there something in our design that makes it more desirable as a tool to kill people than other cups?
What if people drew pornographic pictures on our cups? What if they did that and posted it on Facebook? What if the activity becomes a meme? Oh crap we need to avoid this risk…
We need a security lid. Otherwise, passersby will see what people are drinking with their cups.
What about future cups? How do we make our new cups compatible with the old cups?
Oh, shit. We need to update the design for Britain, France, China, UAE, Russia, Philippines, Japan, Saudi, Mexico, New Zealand… What??! You mean Arabic is written backwards? From right to left??
Thinking too much? I wish.