Icicle Tap
From Function to Experience
This project was developed during a product design course in my fourth semester, where we worked in teams of four. The task was to design a new product, and our team chose to focus on a water tap in response to the increased awareness of hygiene during the COVID-19 pandemic.
What initially attracted me to this topic was precisely how ordinary it is.
Water taps exist in countless variations and are rarely questioned beyond functionality, efficiency, or hygiene standards. My intention was to challenge this perspective and rethink the act of washing hands as an experience rather than a purely functional task.
Instead of treating water as a utility, I wanted to frame it as something inherently pure and almost poetic. The tap itself should not just deliver water, but embody cleanliness in its form and interaction. The central inspiration became the image of an icicle slowly melting in sunlight: a natural, clear source of water that feels both familiar and emotionally positive.
Form Development
Icicles carry strong associations. They remind people of winter, nature, and sensory experiences—like touching cold meltwater or the playful curiosity of interacting with them. I wanted to transfer these associations into the design, using curiosity and emotional engagement as a driver for better hygiene behaviour. This became the defining difference to most existing taps, which focus primarily on technical or hygienic optimization.
From the beginning, this approach introduced a level of complexity that went beyond typical product design.
Designing for emotion, perception, and experience proved to be much more difficult than designing for function alone. It required the team to discuss how something should feel, not just how it should work. This became one of the central challenges of the project.
The concept of the Icicle Tap is based on a hanging form positioned above a sink, resembling a dripping icicle. Instead of water flowing from a fixed outlet, it emerges from multiple small openings and forms a thin film between the tap and the user’s hand. This creates a continuous, unavoidable contact between water and skin, ensuring both interaction and self-cleaning of the object itself.
3D-Printed Prototypes
To test this principle, we built early functional models using 3D printing and simple materials such as tubing. These prototypes allowed us to validate the basic feasibility of the water flow and interaction concept. While a fully functional prototype was not possible within the scope of the project, these experiments were essential in understanding how the interaction could work in practice.
The entire interaction with the tap is designed to happen directly on the object itself. Pulling the icicle controls water flow, rotating it adjusts temperature, and pressing the lower tip—where droplets would naturally form—dispenses a small amount of soap. This creates a unified interaction concept that avoids additional handles or interfaces, reinforcing the idea of a self-contained, self-cleaning object.
Surface Texture Exploration
One of the key design challenges was ensuring that the object remained usable despite the constant presence of water. A completely smooth, circular shape would be difficult to grip and control. This led to the exploration of different surface structures and cross-sections, balancing aesthetic clarity with functional usability.
Throughout the design process, we developed multiple variations to explore this balance. However, the abstract and unconventional form also introduced unexpected issues. The hanging shape allowed for interpretations that were not intended in the original concept, which led to extensive discussions within the team.
This is where the project became particularly formative for me.
As the team lead, I had to continuously argue for design decisions that were based on perception, emotion, and user experience—areas that are difficult to quantify and often harder to communicate. Not all team members were comfortable engaging with these aspects, and discussions about how a product feels or what it communicates were sometimes met with resistance.
To move the project forward, I relied heavily on external validation, including feedback from our professor and user perspectives, to support and justify key decisions. This helped align the team and ensured that critical aspects of the concept were not lost. In the final phase, I pushed strongly for revisions to avoid misleading or problematic associations in the form, which required both persistence and negotiation within the team.
Despite these challenges, the project reached a cohesive final design that stayed true to its original idea.
Looking back, this project became an important turning point in my development as a designer.
It showed me that the most difficult challenges are often not technical, but human. Designing for standards and functionality is relatively straightforward. Designing for perception, emotion, and experience requires a different kind of thinking, and the ability to articulate and defend it.
It also made me realise how rarely design processes focus on the human side in depth. Products are often evaluated through measurable criteria, while the actual user experience: the feelings, associations, and subconscious reactions remains underexplored. Yet these aspects are fundamental to how people perceive and use products.