D. Postlethwaite is a designer we haven’t heard much from, but he’s getting some notice through a project that repurposes old teabags that would otherwise be thrown in the trash.
Designboom has the story. They state that, second only to water, tea is the most-consumed drink in the world. This creates some 6.2 billion tons of trashed teabags every year. This caused the designer to look for ways to bypass the waste this creates. He came up with a functional tea set formed out of old teabags. DB describes the set as “ironic.”
We’ll be pedantic here and point out that the definition of irony is, “a state of affairs or event that is contrary to an intended outcome and is often amusing as a result.” Postlethwaite intended to create a functional tea set out of waste. He created a functional tea set out of waste. That’s not ironic. A humorous part could be that tea sets are typically delicate and elegant and these look ragged and unclean, but that’s more of a grotesquerie, a different kind of humor.
Language is important, everyone.
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I was doing stuff like this on my foundation course 30 years ago. Except I took more skill time and trouble. This isn’t internationally important. It’s student work.
Visually interesting but I wouldn’t drink from one.
I think it is ironic in the sense that the teabags were intended to be disposable, but have been used in a different fashion.
As is spelling…