Automating cultural rituals demands deeper understanding than creating entirely new products.
Something remarkable emerges when a design team spends three years figuring out how to automate a centuries-old tea ritual without diminishing its soul. The Selftea automatic Turkish tea maker, designed by Fatih Saruhan alongside Latif Mahmudoğlu, Osman Cihan Demirel, Mert Gürsoy, Çağlar Saatli, and Tuğçe Oğuztürk, grew from extensive field research in Istanbul between 2022 and 2025. Rather than simply engineering a machine that heats water and steeps leaves, the team documented every sensory element of traditional Turkish tea preparation: temperature progressions, precise steeping intervals, proportional relationships between concentrated tea and hot water. Their patent-pending sliding mechanism transfers boiling water at the optimal moment, replicating conditions that experienced practitioners achieve through years of practiced judgment. The result earned Silver recognition in the 2025 A' Home Appliances Design Award.
Home appliance brands considering culturally significant product categories face a fascinating design challenge. Technical specifications can be documented and replicated with relative ease, but capturing intangible qualities that transform functional processes into meaningful experiences requires far more sophistication. The Selftea approach offers a framework worth studying: begin with cultural immersion, identify which aspects users consider essential versus which represent labor that obscures enjoyment, then automate selectively. The dual-chamber system directly mirrors the traditional double teapot configuration, maintaining visual familiarity that supports user acceptance. Users add water and tea leaves, press a button, and receive properly prepared Turkish tea while retaining control over strength customization. For brands seeking differentiation through cultural innovation, the extensive development timeline illustrates the investment required to achieve genuinely meaningful results.
The Selftea demonstrates that smart automation and cultural authenticity can coexist when designers approach their work with genuine respect and rigorous research. Brands evaluating their own portfolios might ask: where do culturally significant practices exist that contemporary technology could enhance rather than replace? The opportunity awaits organizations willing to invest in deep cultural understanding.
