The standard to-go coffee lid is familiar, but flawed. No matter how many cute little plastic “spill protectors” coffee chains use to keep your hot drink from spilling all over your hands, that doesn’t solve the real problem: the plastic lids force you to drink with an unnatural mouth position. The pursed-lips drinking position causes you to miss out on a lot of the aroma and flavor of your drink.

Seattle company Vapor Path has reinvented the way we’ll all drink our coffee on the go in the future. The Viora Lid is designed to mimic the experience of drinking from a ceramic cup, which the company says is the optimal way to enjoy java. Rather than forcing you to purse your lips to take a sip, the Viora Lid allows you to keep your soft palate open as you drink, thus engaging in the type of breathing that allows you to smell at the same time. Since taste is mostly smell, this design will actually make your coffee taste better.

The classic plastic coffee lid was designed in 1986 and really isn’t a bad design at all – but it isn’t as good as it could be. It features a raised drinking surface which makes you sort of suck the liquid out like you’re drinking from a straw, and it allows spills to happen easily when jostled around. When you tip a cup sporting the Viora lid, a drink well on the lid fills up and you drink from that well over a lip, just like you would drink from a ceramic mug.

A large nose indentation lets you tip your cup naturally rather than throwing your head back because the lid hits your nose. An aroma hole in the center of the lid allows the coffee’s aroma to reach your senses faster, enhancing the drinking experience. With all of these deviations from the standard to-go lid, Vapor Path hopes to change the portable coffee experience so much that it won’t even feel like you’re drinking from a lid anymore.

The Viora design also happens to be better at keeping your coffee in your cup until you’re ready to drink it. As seen in the video above, the unique design stops the coffee from gushing out when it’s jostled and jarred, unlike a conventional lid which will create an impressive (and painful) geyser when subjected to a hard bump from the side. The company is already manufacturing the lid in the US, so hopefully discerning Americans will finally be able to enjoy their coffee in the way it was meant to be enjoyed.

The post Redesigned Lid Will Revolutionize Your Coffee Experience first appeared on Gajitz.

Disposable food packaging is an enormous environmental burden, and designers have been looking for a way to eliminate that burden for quite some time. As great as some of their ideas have been, none have seemed to find their way into the mainstream – or even onto the radar of most consumers. The Ooho might be just the thing to change that.

The Ooho is a bottle-less water bottle. More accurately, it is a blob of edible gel containing water and producing zero non-biodegradable waste. The membrane that holds the water is made of brown algae and calcium chloride, a mixture inspired by molecular gastronomy which works kind of like the membrane that holds an egg yolk in its shape.

Ooho was designed by students Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez, Pierre Paslier, and Guillaume Couche. They formed the blobby water containers by first freezing water into spheres and then forming the membranes around the spheres. Each Ooho consists of a double membrane, which the inventors imagine could allow companies to insert labels between the two layers.

Of course, the perennial problem with edible packaging is how to keep it clean before it reaches the consumer. It would be pointless to wrap the Ooho blobs up in plastic just to avoid the plastic used in bottles, but a biodegradable solution shouldn’t be difficult to develop at some point.

Right now, the designers aren’t convinced that bottled water companies will immediately adopt this type of eco-friendly packaging, even though it is vastly less expensive than plastic bottles – each Ooho costs about two cents to make. But the team hopes that people will begin making the simple concoction at home instead of buying bottled water. The Ooho was a winner of the 2014 Lexus Design Award.

via: FastCo

The post Blobbled Water: Edible Membrane Eliminates Plastic Bottle first appeared on Gajitz.

Move over Orville and Wilbur, there’s a new pair of Wright brothers. While their improvement on the alarm clock may not be as historically important as the fixed-wing aircraft, UK-based brothers Adrian and Jeremy do have one thing over the original Wrights: the Red Dot ‘Best of the Best Design’ award.

As most of us have experienced, the race to shut off an alarm clock is often overly complicated by unnecessary knobs, buttons and the infuriating phone touchscreen. The Flip Alarm Clock, a design the duo created for French brand Lexon, hopes to get rid of your wake-up woes.When set, the side labeled ‘On’ (easily recognizable by the huge letters) faces up. To turn off, the cute little box is simply lifted and turned topsy-turvy.

The classic seven-segment display reorients automatically so it is always readable. The clock also features a touch-sensitive snooze and lighted display. It would most likely suit those who make it out of bed the first try, as its simplicity could easily be taken advantage of by over-zealous sleepers.

The post User-Friendly Alarm Clock Prevents Morning Freak-Outs first appeared on Gajitz.