A RESEARCH ARTEFACT FROM YOUR STUDIO. PRODUCT IS FICTIONAL. SO IS THE FUNDING.
Calibrated to lift, insulate, and grip — in every direction that matters. CORQ exists to make a forgettable interaction feel deliberate.
The world's most reasonably engineered cork-based platform.
INTERACTION MODEL
Our predictive grip model anticipates your intent within 18ms. It tried to wave back. We told it to sit.
Figure A. Pre-recorded hand. Real interaction would have required shaders.
CORE TECHNOLOGY
CORQ-1 is a 14B-parameter open-weight diffusion model trained on every coffee ring ever photographed (n ≈ 14,000,000,000). It runs in zero milliwatts. It runs on the table.
No GPUs. No prompt engineering. No follow-up emails. Just a single inanimate disc, predicting flatness one frame at a time.
*ARTISANALLY INFERRED.
CASE STUDY 1
Reduce ceramic ring-formation by 99.4% across most surfaces. Improve perceived punctuality by 12%. Survive at least one dinner party.
“A coaster is the only domestic appliance that earns its keep by doing nothing at all.”
CASE STUDY 2
Thermal-Diffusion Model (TDM) maintains contact-surface temperature across the human-acceptable range. A figure, not a guarantee.
Saturated. Optimistic. Not for tables you respect.
The default. Pleasant. Lightly unmemorable.
Desaturated. Reliable. Possibly British.
CASE STUDY 3
CORQ achieves a circularity index of 1.000 (95% CI: 0.9998–1.0002). Reviewed by two engineers and a divorced topologist.
INTERACTIVE
Type a word. Press Flip. Tell yourself it is a feature. Letters rotate independently around their vertical axis on a 700ms cadence.
GRIP-LOCKED ANTISLIP
A microstructured base layer holds the coaster steady on every surface we own. We did not buy more surfaces.
SUSTAINABILITY
VEGAN-FRIENDLY25 years
Average age of first cork harvest
Every 9 years
Harvesting interval
0 mW
Power draw while in use
Cork harvested from sustainably managed Quercus suber stands (Wikipedia, 2024). Trees not harmed in the making of this metaphor.
We have, in fact, seen this before.
VOICES
“Wouldn't sail without it. Wouldn't sail, anyway.”
Reginald Hawthorne
Maritime re-enactor, Bristol
“This coaster understood me before my therapist did.”
Vivian Cross
Off-grid influencer (currently online)
“A breakthrough in passive surface engineering. The peer review was warm.”
Dr. Aarav Pelt
Theoretical caffeinologist
“I asked the model to review it. It hallucinated agreement.”
Margaux
AI whisperer (self-employed)
“It is a circle. So is the moon.”
Owen, 8
Not allowed to drink coffee
PRESS KIT
CHOOSE YOUR STACK
VARIANT
The original. One layer. Fully sufficient.
VARIANT
Twin-stack. For ambition. Or two mugs.
VARIANT
Triple-stack. For commitment. And tannins.
OPEN-WEIGHT MODEL
¹Department of Tabletop Studies, ²Independent Researcher
ABSTRACT
We introduce CORQ-1, an open-weight cork-stack diffusion model trained on 14 billion coffee-ring impressions. CORQ-1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on the WoodenBench (WB), TileBench (TB), and Glass-Coffee-Table (GCT) evaluation suites, exceeding strong baselines by an average of 37.9% on the proposed RoPE metric (Roundness Optimisation & Perimeter Engineering). We release weights, schematics, and a single OBJ file.
CITE AS
@article{almond2026corq,
title = {CORQ-1: A Multi-Domain Diffusion Model for Beverage-Stable Surface Synthesis},
author = {Almond, Y. and Marrow, J. and Tipton, C.},
journal = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Domestic Object Engineering},
year = {2026},
pages = {1-12},
note = {We promise this is the last one.}
}IN CONCLUSION
If we will do this much for a piece of cork, consider what we might do for something that ships. The next product launch site does not have to look like the last one.