Rainy days? Just use your coffee cup holder umbrella

It’s been rainy here in the Missouri Ozarks for several days, and we’re expecting more on the way.  But South Korean designer Jung-Woo Lee of ekdesign has created a way for you to enjoy your coffee and stay out of the rain as well in hopes of surviving the Springfield downpour of 2010.  He’s designed an umbrella with a coffee cup holder in the handle.  (Yes, seriously.)  Umbrellas can be cumbersome because they take up an entire useful hand, and if you’ve got coffee in the other hand, you can’t hold anything else.  So the purpose of this umbrella is to allow you to have your coffee, your umbrella and a free hand all at the same time.  Hurray!

Except, as Fast Company has noticed as well in their post about the umbrella, it doesn’t seem to be the most flexible design.  The handle cup holder forces the umbrella back at an angle, so it requires you to hold the umbrella a specific way in order to use it.  That angle could definitely cause problems.  I’ll quote Fast Company because they summarized it very well:

What happens when a gust of wind kicks up? I’ll tell you what happens: Your shirt’s ruined, your hand is burning, and you’re cursing the well-meaning but misguided Jung-Woo Lee. Since your coffee flew into the thick necked bruiser next to you, he’s kicked your a**, to boot. So you’re wet, black and blue, angry, you smell like coffee–which you haven’t been able to consume yet. And then someone comes by and says, “Wow, cool umbrella–is that a cup holder?”

Yeah, I’m not sure the umbrella cup holder design has been perfected yet.  Let’s wait for version 2.0.