Most tea bags contain a powdery mix called tea dust that makes for a lousy cuppa, so people who take their tea seriously, prefer to use full leaf loose tea placed in a strainer called a tea ball. The problem is that the tea ball hasn't been updated in over a century, and remains a fiddly, hard to clean device that leaves a puddle of cold tea wherever you put it.

This new tea infuser from Massachusetts College of Art and Design student Paul Sukphisit is an elegantly simple one piece design with a clip that hangs over the rim of the cup, which then becomes a drip catcher once you pull the infuser out of the cup and lie it flat. The design won Sukphisit the Student Merit Award from the Industrial Design Society of America. Let's just hope some manufacturer steps up to the plate and puts it into production.

Yanko Design