Aerospace Engineer Designs the Perfect Ice Cream Scoop

If only all industrial designers paid as much attention to ergonomics as this engineer.

Michigan-based Michael Chou is a dad who loves ice cream, and has
scooped a lot of it out for his kids. Here’s the thing: He likes the ice
cream when it’s frozen solid, not partially melted, and found that he
couldn’t effectively get it out of the container using a conventional
ice cream scoop.

An aerospace engineer by training, Chou examined the problem and
found the standard ice cream scoop was at fault. “Current ice cream
scoops are designed in a way that forces you to use weak wrist joints to
scoop ice cream,” he writes. “When you are scooping ice cream with
standard ice cream scoops, you are doing a prying motion. This prying
motion puts tremendous amounts of stress on your weak wrist joints. Your
brain then tries to save your wrists by not letting you pry very
hard—thus making scooping ice cream very difficult.”

Using his “engineer’s understanding of ergonomic design and
mechanical force,” Chou hit the drawing board to create a better scoop.
Give it up to the man–it took him three years and some 38 prototypes
before he perfected his design, and as most of it was worked on
after-hours, he calls it the Midnight Scoop.

    [With the Midnight Scoop], you’re not using the small weak muscles located inside the wrist. Instead, you hold the curved end with the palm of your hand and “push” into the ice cream. This allows you to keep your wrists straight and protected while you use large muscles like your arms and chest—which are significantly stronger than your wrist.

    …The handle is also long enough to help you reach all parts of a giant container of ice cream yet narrow enough to fit inside small pint size containers just as well.

    …The front scoop section is thin enough to cut through ice cream like butter, and thick enough to last. The base of the scoop design forces ice cream to curl into that appealing ice-cream-advertisement look, every time.

Chou had no intentions of designing a disposable object, and has spec’d
the Midnight Scoop to be forged from 6061 aero-space grade aluminum.
With a modest funding goal of $17,500, Chou threw the project onto Kickstarter and easily doubled his goal. Here’s the pitch vid:

Sure, an ice cream scoop is a humble object, but it’s Chou’s lifetime
guarantee for the object, and overall attitude towards product longevity
that really impressed me. “Some companies design their products to last
a certain amount of time, and then force you to rebuy the same products
over and over again,” he says. “That stops here. That’s not how a true
engineer thinks. And that’s not how an engineer would run their
business. The midnight scoop is designed perfectly and will last
forever.”

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