Hi Friends! I’m excited to share this week’s “Designing Near Future” Newsletter with you. If this email landed in your promotions folder, you know what to do. Welcome to the 50+ new members 👋 

Here’s the breakdown of what’s in store today

⭐ 1 Shift: 3 Unique Ventures in the Coffee World

⚡ 1 Tip: Telling Stellar Design Stories Through Montage Editing

💊 3 Resources: Creative Resources For Taking Your Work to the Next Level

⭐ Shift

3 Unique Ventures in the Coffee World

Today we are going to try something different.

And you guys have to let me know what you think at the end of this.

I want to share 3 stories with you that caught my eye recently. All these stories come from probably the most saturated market - the coffee market. After all it’s the most consumed beverage in the world. (after water)

At the end, I’ll share what you can learn from these ideas if you want to apply it to your own industry.

Alright, let’s get into it.

1. Coffee and AI

The Meticulous Espresso Machine on Kickstarter is unquestionably one of the coolest looking and distinctively performance packed coffee machines on the market.

Meticulous stands out by operating akin to a manual lever machine while utilizing advanced, nuanced technology, setting itself apart as the first robotic lever espresso machine in the world.

There’s ten digital sensors in the machine. 10! This allows the machine to meticulously (pun intended) monitor and adjust every aspect of the brewing process—such as water temperature, pressure, flow rate, and the weight of the liquid in the cup—ensuring a perfect cup every time, aiming to mirror the finesse of a professional barista.

This video also explains that it makes miniscule micro adjustments in real time. Really cool!

Why I found this interesting is for 2 reasons -

1. Even with all the complexities, they are able to make a machine that has ¼th the amount of parts compared to traditional machines.

2. It uses software to control a lot of the mechanics, which means it remembers every cup you make (They also have an app) and that the experience can be updated for years to come

Let’s switch gears. Here’s another coffee story for you but an unusual one.

2. Coffee Waste and Sunglasses

Ochis from Ukraine makes sunglasses, that too really cool ones, out of ground coffee waste. With 2.5 billion cups of coffee consumed every day around the world, there’s an almost unlimited supply of this waste material.

Maksym Havrylenko, the brain behind Ochis Coffee, says that these sunglasses decompose 100 times faster than typical plastics. The glasses, made from a mix of coffee grounds, flax, and a vegetable oil-based substance, not only have a reduced environmental footprint, but they can also double as fertilizer once they're no longer in use.

This is interesting to me for 2 reasons:

1. They really celebrate the visual properties of coffee and it results in a unique aesthetic. I am personally a fan.

2. Working with a unique material has it’s own challenges but even then they are able to make the sunglasses waterproof and scratch resistant.

3. Coffee and 3D Printing

Michael Rivera, an assistant professor at CU Boulder, along with his colleagues, has discovered a method for 3D printing using a paste made entirely from old coffee grounds, water, and other eco-friendly ingredients. This was actually in the news a couple weeks ago so I dug deeper.

This idea germinated when Rivera observed unused coffee grounds being wasted at a café he frequently visited during his graduate studies. Instead of using traditional materials like PLA for 3D printing, which takes up to 1,000 years to decompose in landfills, his method utilizes used coffee grounds.

The team has crafted various objects, from jewelry to plant pots. The resultant 3D printed objects are durable, comparable in strength to unreinforced concrete.

Additionally, objects made from this material can be ground up and reused for printing, all over again. Personally, I don’t think coffee ground-based 3D printing will become mainstream though, in fact Michael too views it as a stepping stone towards finding sustainable 3D printing alternatives to plastics.

This story stood out to me for obvious reasons. It’s just simply better for the planet. I am an industrial designer who uses 3D printing almost everyday and finding sustainable materials has always been a challenge.

Other businesses to keep your eye on:

1. Xbloom A super modern and smart coffee machine that makes pour over from beans. It’s got these automatic robotic features that got me excited.

2. Frank Body, an Australian skincare brand, offers a popular coffee-based body scrub combining coffee, almond oil, vitamin E, and sea salt. This is apparently really famous and I have been living under a rock.

So what are the learnings here?

When you consider saturated industries, it becomes incredibly difficult to stand out if you are not innovating. But, the stories above show you that it is possible to do that.

There’s two things to keep in mind when playing in saturated markets like the coffee industry:

1. What does this industry create as a byproduct: In this case, a lot of waste. What can you do with this waste? Secondly, most saturated markets create new behaviors and those new behaviors create new problems. In the coffee world the amount of solutions out there has turned a vast majority into coffee-nerds. When designing for an industry, study the psycho-social impact of the existing solutions first, before testing out your new novel idea.

2. Who do you cater to: Probably the most important question in any design project. But more so in a market that has tons of products. If you are designing a coffee machine, you want to ask yourself who do you cater to. I am perfectly fine with an aeropress so if you have a target customer like me in mind, it might be an interesting approach to do aeropress attachments or mods than trying to sell me a new machine.

Alright that’s it for this section!

What do you think - do you like this format better for this newsletter or want me to go to the previous one? Let me know by replying to this email. Honest feedback helps everyone 😀 

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⚡ Tip

Telling Stellar Design Stories Through Montage Editing

A quick tip to tell better design stories. I am borrowing this idea from the film industry.

Your design process story needs montage editing.

"Montage" is a French word meaning "assembly" or "editing." In cinematic terms, a montage refers to a sequence of shots that are edited together to convey a specific idea or emotion.

Montage editing often compresses time and space, conveying a lot of information or emotion in a short duration. A classic example is the "training montage" in sports films, where a series of shots show the protagonist training over days or weeks, but the sequence only lasts a few minutes.

Sergei Eisenstein, a pioneering Soviet filmmaker and film theorist, described five methods of montage in his writings:

1. Metric Montage: Based on the absolute length of clips, without regard to the content.

2. Rhythmic Montage: Incorporates the content of the shots, where the visuals create a rhythmic pattern, often tied to movement or actions within the shots.

3. Tonal Montage: The emotional meaning of the shots takes precedence. The emotional tone or resonance of each shot is what determines its place in the sequence.

4. Thematic Montage: Also known as "overtonal" or "associational" montage, it creates more complex themes and concepts by building on the previous three methods.

5. Intellectual Montage: This is where the concept of "collision" becomes vital. By juxtaposing two unrelated shots, a new, third idea is generated in the viewer's mind. This collision of independent shots to create a new concept is the essence of intellectual montage

Montage editing and the theory of collision were revolutionary in their time and continue to influence filmmakers and editors today.

You'll want to leverage this framework for your storytelling. For example, when discussing and recapping your design iterations, consider the visuals you wish to display (renderings, animations, videos) to create a rhythm. You story telling can be rhythmic too. This Google ad is a perfect example of that. Another great example of this is the Don’t Blink ad by Apple.

Personally, I have started turning to film and music for a lot of good story telling advice.

💊 Resources

3 links to boost your creativity.

• Dalle-3 is finally out (for some) and the level of control it offers as a text to image AI platform is unmatched.

• Shot Deck Fully searchable high definition movie stills.

• This video on how to shoot yourself in a cinematic way is really cool. Also the content creator has really good storytelling skills.