The Japanese design firm Nendo is back–this time with possibly the cutest picture book you’ve ever seen created by its founder, Oki Sato. Called Not Just a Cup, the book follows a lone coffee mug that realizes it’s missing its corresponding spoon. To solve the problem of stirring coffee when there’s no spoon to be found, the little cup morphs into different shapes.
To go with the book, Nendo created a series of cup prototypes. In one, the cup has transformed into a horseshoe-shaped receptacle, presumably so you can mix your coffee by tilting it back and forth, while another has a spoon built into the cup itself. Others are less practical but more playful. One idea has a tiny little drawer built into the bottom of the cup; one has a pyramidal bottom so the cup never sits straight up and down.
Through the story, Nendo demonstrates that a cup is never just a cup–within each object is its design process aiming to crack a problem, no matter how mundane.