Smart Tea Utensil Design for Improving Beginners’ Tea Brewing Experience

Abstract

In Taiwan, people who enjoy traditional Gongfu tea are becoming older and older, while the younger generation has many alternative beverages to select from. In order to sustainably pass down traditional tea-drinking culture, this study has incorporated concepts and methodologies of the peak-end rule, customer journey maps (CJMs), quality function deployment (QFD), fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP), and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation based on entropy, resulting in the development of a set of tea utensils tailored for a novice or beginner tea maker with the purpose of improving the tea-drinking experience of the younger generation. In this study, the ranking of the importance in regard to six design requirements turned out to be: enhancing the sniffing experience (0.240); having ergonomic designs that facilitate a smooth process of pouring hot water into the cup (0.205); increasing the ease of storing tea utensils after brewing (0.162); enabling users to more precisely determine the strength of the tea (0.144); increasing fun while pouring tea leaves into the teapot (0.143); and having clearly designated space for placing each tea utensil (0.107). Through the experts’ evaluation, 66.6% of them rated the design outcome as “good” or “very good”, indicating that the innovative tea utensils developed in this study can effectively satisfy users’ needs. This study can be the supplement to the innovation shortage of tea-culture-related studies, establish the research framework in the academic field, and bring more innovation and potential to the field of the tea culture.