Tea for Differences

The brief of this year is “Rituals”, which I believe are the repeated activities created by humans that are common among multiple people. So it is mainly about bringing people together. For the short marathon projects, I examined three different existing “rituals”: etiquette, economic activities, and psychological analysis, and criticized them since they achieved the opposite of what they intended to do. Instead of creating bonds between people, these rituals set them apart. Therefore, I proposed another way of bringing people together with tea. Since tea is basically representative of the lifestyle of people, from different places and with different characters, merging different types of tea would demonstrate the possibility of the merging of lifestyles. The first part of the tea project is about different cultures, while the second is about different living habits. Through this project, I wanted to explore tea and the problem of living together, while providing a proposal of “how to live together”.

 

The aim of the design is to create human intimacy between the Chinese and British married couples at a dinner table with an object. The target audience is specifically married couples in between their 30s and 50s since it is harder for them to adjust to different cultures than the youths or the kids, while they are more accustomed to their own cultural rituals at dinner tables. They have a common language about family and domestic life, but hold different rituals at dinners. Due to the vast migration of the Chinese to other countries, there is a need for both cultures to understand each other more. Therefore, the object or space should develop an atmosphere for them to be more aware of the similarities and differences between each other, and be more open-minded towards the differences.