Darth Coffee Cup, everyone

Here’s the thing: this coffee cup looks cool and all, but we’re really not hurting for a new kind of coffee cup. Ensuring that the coating on your paper cups is biodegradable means that you can just compost the cups — that’s what many of the cafes here in Seattle do. You can also buy reusable to-go cups already, though they’re still working out the kinks (silicone lids taste pretty weird).

These design competitions are fun brainstorms, but because the ideas are essentially finalized and then face professional scrutiny, a lot of them don’t make it past the first cut. Making a cup out of coffee grounds? Same problems as paper cups. Make the Darth cup above? Great, more plastic consumption. The most practical submission I see is this one, with built-in fins to help radiate heat.

Stackable, familiar form and color, same materials — which is more than I could say for the (admittedly cool) heatswell cup.

It’s interesting what people come up with, though: check out the rest of the submissions here.

[via Core77 and Dvice]

This post is tagged: brainstorms, cafes, coating, Coffee, coffee cup, coffee grounds, compost, consumption, core77, cup, cut, Darth, Design, design competitions, DVICE, Ensuring, fins, form, Fun, great, Headline, heat, kind, lids, lot, MAKE, mdash, Paper, paper cups, plastic, radiate, scrutiny, seattle, silicone, Stackable, submission, submissions, thing