Teaism in Practice - Sipping through the Lines

The phrase ‘Teaism’, coined by Kakuzo Okakura in ‘The Book of Tea’ is the philosophy and cultural celebration of tea as more than just a beverage. It was used as a way of introducing western culture to the concept of the tea ceremony and the meditative and spiritual values accompanying it. Teaism focuses on impermanence, imperfection and an appreciation of nature, transforming what most Brits see as an ordinary beverage into a very mindful and social ritual. Over the past 2 months I have developed a manifesto to be followed while I worked on visual responses to different teas I drank. This manifesto contains multiple teachings of Tea masters and Taoist philosophers, which I then converted into a design manifesto, attempting to draw similarities between the act of drinking tea and the process of designing. I used a graph to measure the different emotions, body feel, taste and productivity to develop a new visualisation for each type of tea, to then be converted into a set of unique teabag cases inspired by my own personal experience.

Saul Thomas