Sydney designers unplugged: people, process, product



Kristin Schanche, industrial designer, Housewares International – Homewares
talks about designing the Alex Liddy Beveda mugs

I design products like ceramics, glassware, cutlery - we’ve got cookware as well. Some of the brands that we have are Alex Liddy and Forum and Mayfair & Jackson. Mayfair & Jackson is the lower brand, we’ve got a medium brand called Forum and then Alex Liddy is the premium brand - that’s of the tabletop items like ceramics, glassware, cutlery, and those kind of things. We have also got two brands in cookware, one’s Arcosteel and the other one is Baccarat.

One product I’m quite happy with is the Beveda mug that we designed. It’s a ceramic mug like any other mug, but instead of a normal mug with a handle it’s a mix of material. We’ve got the ceramic with the silicone rings which allow it to be used in the microwave as well as the dishwasher and you can bake in it as well. So if you look at it, it can be used as baking dish as well as a mug. I think that makes it unique and something different, it also has a bit of a texture to it.

It started off wanting to use mixed materials with ceramics. We were going to do a mug and a soup story – like a bowl that would work from mug through to bowl for soups and also hot drinks. I was out doing research, I was in Myer I think, looking at different mugs. I was wearing these bangles and they kind of dropped onto the mugs and I was just playing around with them, I kind of liked the repetition of it and the mix of the materials, and I think that’s where the idea started.

With this product we had to do a few prototypes with the silicone rings to see if your hands would get burnt – and how close they had to be or how big the rings had to be as well. Another challenge was the ceramics, getting that right from China – accurate enough so that the rings wouldn’t just roll off. I think that was probably the major thing, a lot of backwards and forwards and testing. It was quite important that the ridges in the ceramic were deep and sharp enough so that the rings won’t fall off when you are using it. In ceramics it is quite hard getting close tolerances like that so we are quite happy with how this turned out.