TEA BOX
designing a container to easily store and access my roommate and i’s tea bags!
Made entirely out of birch plywood and entirely friction fit (no adhesive), the design for this tea box was inspired by my mother’s spice tin: each variety in its own compartment, immediately visible and accessible. The dodecahedron geometry arose from the functional problem that tea bags vary in size across brands. Since this shape has the lengths of each compartment vary with orientation, this form ultimately accommodates all of the tea-bag-sizes my roommate and I have.
The material is 0.225” birch plywood, laser cut and entirely friction fit (without any adhesives). Getting the joints right required twenty-four total tolerance tests; nine to establish the machine’s kerf without accounting for geometry, five for panel-to-base fits, and ten (plus) for panel-to-panel fits. The finished product survived drop testing up to five feet.
The botanical engraving is adapted from plants in my favorite tea, drawn during a quarter studying the Arts and Crafts movement in my “History and Ethics of Design” course. The movement’s central argument, that every day objects deserve the same care and intentionality as fine art, seemed like an apt framework for an object whose purpose is elevating a small, every day task.