Product colour of the future

My parents recently repainted their kitchen and my mother, who is famous for her lack of artistic talent, chose the paint colour, a cool grey (although can it be called a colour?).  I have to say, she's pulled an absolute blinder, as the grey she has chosen seems to compliment everything put against it incredibly well.  So it got me thinking, as I have said in previous posts, eventually our current obsession with black or white products will wane, so what then?  I would suggest this and will be using it in the not too distant future.  The future is bright, the future is grey!

design ideas - Coffee plunger

I have friends who can't seem to plunge coffee without jetting it all over the table.  They get too impatient and push down too hard - ahem.  Whilst this may be a comment on a society that is in too much of a rush to even wait for good home made coffee. It got me thinking about improvements (probably gimmicks) that manufacturers could make to their designs, to offer a USP.  There are many ways to slowly depress the plunger, including motors and wind up mechanisms, but in the end I settled for a weight that could be placed on top of the plunger once the coffee had brewed for the required amount of time, so that our friend gravity could be left to do the job.  The coffee will no longer jet, but in regards to the manufacturers, it probably won't fly either.

design idea - ear buddy

A while ago I read an artice regarding litter on beaches.  People use cotton buds, then flush them down the toilet.  13,000 were found on 400 beaches surveyed this year.  I've heard there is a move to try and make the tubes out of cardboard rather than plastic, so that they degrade. 

I wonder if a reusable cotton bud design concept - not for make up, just for cleaning ears, made from a very low shore silicone, that could then be washed under a tap and stored in the bathroom cabinet would be a way to further reduce the problem of litter?

My gran always said the only thing you should put in your ear is your elbow, she must have been double jointed! But despite her advice, people still clean their ears with these things, myself included.

design idea - safety syringe

I've been playing around with ways to make simple everyday things safer.  Whilst looking at how needles are disposed I wondered why the lid couldn't be made into a disposing feature. 

When the lid is placed back over the needle and firmly pushed on it locks, making the needle safe and the two parts very difficult to separate.  The assembly can then be safely removed from the syringe and disposed and a new needle and lid fitted by pushing the syringe into the needle whilst holding onto its collar.

design idea - Wash your mouth out

Whilst brushing my teeth, I was wondering if you could simply combine a mouth wash bottle with an optic (that dispenses measures of alcohol in bars). So you could either fill the cap, or drink from the bottle, but each time it would be a measured result.  I spent about an hour doing a very quick doodle of an initial ideas (obviously not fully resolved!).

The images show a section of the bottle, so imagine a round bottle was cut in half and the exposed faces couloured in. 

The bottle has a inner assembly ultrasonically welded into it (in blue, green and red).  The idea being that you shake the bottle (as you would normally), then turn it upside down (2) and depress the raised button in the cap.  This forces a rod to act against a sealing valve (in red) opening it and allowing mouthwash to flow into a reservoir.  The cap could be clear so that you can see this happening.  Once you release your finger, the valve would close and you can turn the bottle the right way up. 

The air trap (2) is important as it means that the reservoir cannot be filled completely, so when the bottle is turned the right way up, the liquid will not be level with the top (3) so it won't spill when you unscrew the lid.  You now have a system that will always give you an exact measure that can be poured into something. 

It would be good to try and reduce the part count further, but the added tooling complexity would probably prove very costly.  It would also be good to replace the spring with a plastic substitute as this would be an expensive part when the production is viewed as a whole, but shelf life has to also be considered if the bottle is stored in a stock room for a year before being sold.  Metal spring force remains constant where as plastic memory means it looses efficiency over time. This has probably been done before, but hey.