Sketches:
After deciding the "a better water bottle" idea had some merit, I began to sketch out some thoughts. Most of my earlier ideas toyed with bending the lid of the bottle over to the side so it would be easier to fill at low-flow fountains and in tight sinks. I was also concerned with integrating a carabiner clipping ring into the bottle shape as well, an idea I'd had for some time after seeing many students clip Nalgene bottles to their backpacks with carabiners.
Early foam mock-ups:
I made a few quick foam mock-ups of the more promising sketches. Both mock-ups put the lid off to one side of the bottle, but they were still essentially "upright." The carabiner would nest into the main cavity of the bottles as seen in the photo.
I eventually realized these ideas were fatally flawed (which is to say, Mike Strasser laughed in my face and rightly so). First, if you were to open the bottle while it still had water above the lowest point of the lid, water would spill out. To be able to drink safely from the bottle, I'd have to use a push/pull type nipple and make the bottle squeezable (like a bike bottle). But our school's facilities would make fabrication of these bottles out of a rigid plastic difficult, and out of soft, squeezable plastic, impossible. Time to iterate . . .
Final idea:
The idea hit me one morning while biking to class: Why fight with the larger axis of the bottle, and not work with the smaller axis? Rather than put the lid onto the side of the bottle, turn the whole bottle on its side and put the lid on the top. I made one sketch of the idea and knew this was it. The user would grasp the bottle from the side, like a big mug. A water-drop-like shape seemed to create a nice handle and was subtly in line with the nature of the product. I quickly hand-cut a foam mock-up, put it in my hand, and began thinking of how I would make the damn thing.
