Watch yourself
I recently found a new ramen place called Rai Rai Ken, right around the corner from Momofuko and much darker. The broth and noodles are thicker too, the seats are lower, couples speak quietly and students spatter needlepoint drops on their moleskines as they slurp. I’m writing about Rai Rai Ken because there are small mouth-height mirrors built into the counter that separates the diners from the kitchen. As you hover over your bowl to suck up the thrust of noodles, the mirror clearly shows them entering your mouth, then your chewing and cathartic napkin-pat.
photo from Gothamist
I love designing everyday things because it requires me to watch myself. I need to make the familiar, and thus invisible, processes that constitute a day foreign enough to wonder about and then to design for. Right now I’m working on a computer mouse and need to explore the physical movements that program functions normally obscure.
When anthropologists ran out of new tribes, they turned their discipline on themselves and found that familiar culture could be mapped just like novel culture; they had to consciously approached it as unfamiliar. Artists do something similar when they draw from life and force themselves to see the world as a splash of lines and tones rather than a series of objects with names, meanings, and history.
This is my design process, but causing the user to attend to an everyday ritual is also one of my major goals. I designed the Sorapot’s handle to transfer some of the tea’s heat. Not enough to be painful, but enough to be unignorable. The heat, combined with the clearly visible tea leaves and steam that rises as you pour, unpacks “making tea” into “filling, grasping, steeping, smelling, pouring.”
3 Comments
January 13th, 2007 at 5:48 am
Hi Joey, thank you very much for the comment! I think what you are doing is amazing!! Keep up the good work! BTW, I go to Rai Rai Ken often and I LOVEEEE ramen!
January 13th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Hey, I love Rai Rai Ken too, but never noticed the mirrors before reading this post. Thanks for pointing it out and keep up the great work!
January 15th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
Thank you for your comments. Does anyone know of other really good NYC ramen places, preferably with mirrors?