Fireside Chat 3 - backstory

Dan: Hello. This is fireside chat number three. Today we're going to talk about the quirky cup backstory.

Hannah: So Dan, why are you spending all this time trying to find the perfect mug handle?

Dan: So this all started a year and a half ago. I had spent all day working on robot grippers, so engineering. And when you design a gripper for a robot, it has to grab something like a billion times.

And so you kind of geek out over it. Like you look at every detail, you turn it into a physics problem and solve it.

Hannah: And what are these robot grippers grabbing?

Dan: So like this was for a manufacturing line. And so you have to grab a part, a widget. And, you know, you think a lot about what you're grabbing and how you're grabbing it and how to create the best tooling.

Hannah: Okay, so you spent all day watching robots grab things. Mm hmm. And then you went home and made a mug?

Dan: So then I didn't go home right away. I went rock climbing. Okay. So I spent over an hour trying to climb up these walls, trying to climb a harder wall than my friend.

Hannah: What kind of rock climbing? Bouldering or with a harness?

Dan: So this was with harnesses. So we were trying to climb up and so we would take turns like belaying each other. Try to ascend and I spent a while with grabbing onto these handholds and trying to think about if I put my fingers here a little bit. Or there a little bit, it might be a little stronger.

And looking at, hey, if I grab onto this type of a hold, versus this type of a hold, it's a little different shape. And all these subtle differences matter for how easy it is to stay on the wall. Mm hmm. So I had just done that. My forearms are tired and it was a good rock climbing session. And I had just spent all this time thinking about how do my hands grab on to these little detailed things.

And I got home that evening, I made myself a cup of tea and I grabbed onto the handle on the mug and I was like, what is this? And it was so counter to the type of engineering work on robot grippers. And it represented one of like the worst rock climbing holds ever. I even looked up online, there's a, there's a mug that you can get that's like intentionally horrible to hold because it uses a really small rock climbing grip.

Yeah. As the handle, and so it's intentionally horrible to hold. Yeah. It's pretty funny.

Hannah: And even though a regular traditional loop style mug wasn't like that, it was still pretty awful. Mm hmm. Yeah. What made it awful?

Dan: It was just, like, I usually grab it with like two fingers in the loop and like two fingers out.

And so your hand, your fingers, Aren't in the position that they like to be in and then you have to grip it squeeze it really hard I think we talked about friction your hand sliding down in fireside chat number one, I think so That and then the ability to keep it stable not have it wobble And then also when you go and take a sip you put your thumb on the mug and it's hot so there's factors like that that just made it not work.

And I'd always picked up coffee mugs, I just had never thought about it like that. So that was the spark.

Hannah: So robot, grippers, and rock climbing.

Dan: So I sketched this zigzag shaped handle. And I sent it to one of my friends who's an amateur ceramicist, and I was like, Colleen, we have to figure out how to make this.

And a year and a half later, it took a little longer than I thought.

That's pretty exciting.

Also I printed that first handle, that zigzag shaped handle. That I had first sketched up and it was terrible. It was worse than a regular mug, somehow, and then after a lot more iterations, it became way, way better.

But yeah. Yeah.

Hannah: People need to get a grip so they can take a sip.

Trying to figure out how to work that in there naturally, but I couldn't so I just worked it in there unnaturally.

Dan: Excellent, that's all for now.