Dennis Nordstrøm

1

The Networked

Kitchen

The Networked Kitchen Systems

Here is a small description of a student-project I worked on called the Networked Kitchen Project. The project was about helping companies within the kitchen-industry to think about the kitchen of the future, and thereby provide ideas for future products. I will try to explain the process of the project by using a Explore – Create – Relate framework. Within the project, students worked as a simulated com-pany. This meant that the students were collaborating teams of Design, Human Factors, Marketing, and Management. I was in the management team working with research communication, making sure that the research was communicated and thus informed design decisions.

Explore – Since the only focus on area of research was the “kitchen space”, we decided to move forward with “cultural probes”, first mentioned by Bill Gaver. This was done in order to get more abstract and inspirational data on kitchens that would challenge us as users of the kitchen. “Cultural Probes” are packages that were sent out to kitchen users, containing a disposable camera, postcards, a diary, and a small scrapbook. The users filled out the probes for a week, and then sent them back. The varied material gave the team an alternative point of view on the kitchen space. Furthermore, more specific inter-views and observations were made of people using the kitchen. Out of these probes, interviews, and observa-tions came a lot of data. From the gathered data the team made poster portraits, process posters, kitchen style posters, video interaction clips, small scale scenarios, large scale scenarios, and we used “infor-mances” (Role-play) in order to gain empathy with the different people we had interviewed. Through all this the team got a good understanding of the kitchen as a social space. After data collection, techniques such as video walls, video card game, scenarios, and “informances” were applied, thus enabling us to come up with ideas, which we prototyped with paper and card-board.

One of our “cultural probes”

Some of our Themes that emerged after the Video Card Game

Dennis Nordstrøm

2

The Networked

KitchenCreate – Having looked at use of space, interaction styles, social space, space context, space connota-tions etc. within kitchens, we had about twelve themes that emerged. These were then boiled down to the five theme/insight posters (Which is send as additional attachments): balancing tasks, flexing utensils, managing the flow of space, sensing information, and spicing up the future. These theme/insight posters were used to communicate research data, and worked as a discourse for design. The posters had ques-tions, pictures, and design opportunities stated on them, which all led the design team to create new product-ideas within a kitchen-topic. By using questions to communicate insights instead of statements, you allow room for further exploration of the insights. One might say that questions use the “pull” aspect, where statements more use the “push” aspect In this way the posters led the designers to gain their own insights by discussing and by thinking about the questions stated. Through the insights the designers designed a set of concepts, there amongst an intelligent computer that could provide the user with recipes by sensing the food through RFID tags.

Relate – For this project our “relation” part of the project was very engaged with various companies within the industry. This company involvement was done in order to show the companies what sort of products the future could hold. Therefore the relation part revolved more around fitting the products to companies instead of fitting it to users, which definitely could be a next stage in the project. What we did was to present the various posters, stories, scenarios, users, and prototypes to representatives from a multitude of companies that deal with design of anything from cutlery to appliances like refrigerators and dish-washers. Our team chose to facilitate a workshop in order to relate our ideas with the specific products of the various companies. The process of the workshop was: Presentation of techniques and findings, brainstorm with representatives to fit the insights to their companies, and presentation and discus-sion about the new ideas and values. In this way the company-representatives were able to choose and select from the ideas and concepts designed by us students, and then through collaboration with the students shape these concepts into fitting the company’s specific con-text..

A couple of our Scenario Posters(Are enclosed as additional files)

Our Intelligent Recipe Prototpe