Musical Tea Kettle

For my Product Design class at UC Berkeley, my team decided to innovate on a common household appliance: the stovetop tea kettle. In order to improve the ambience of the kettle's environment and create a luxury product, we added a mechanism that produces a melody with whistles powered by the escaping steam of the kettle.

 

To achieve this melody, a plate is electromechanically rotated to expose different whistle holes to the air stream sequentially. Based on an expired patent that uses a fully mechanical system, our system makes use of modern electronics and manufacturing techniques to simplify the mechanism significantly and power it with a rechargeable battery. The kettle was recreated and modified with CAD software to represent the final design.

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This project (and course as a whole) taught me the numerous steps required for thoughtful and successful product design, including various methods for ideation, patent research, customer needs specification, downselection of competing concepts, and business plan formation.