Smart Cooking Tools: A Study of the Design & Development of Sensor-Based, Internet-Connected Devices for Cooking

For the past 50 years, appliance design has been chasing efficiency. For more and more consumers, cooking has gone from a chore to a pleasure. Consumers now yearn for kitchen products that enhance the joy and camaraderie of cooking. We are at a point of change in the appliance industry. Ubiquitous computing—a technology model where computers recede into the background of everyday life by being integrated into everyday objects—has begun to appear in household products like thermostats and bathroom scales. The culture around a product has also begun to drive innovation in the consumer products industry. Product design methods are shifting away from siloed approaches—where researchers, designers, and engineers do not collaborate often—towards design methods where many stakeholders work together to define all parts of how a product is designed. The purpose of this project is to bridge ubiquitous computing, domestic culture, and cross-discipline design methods in order to design, develop, and test concepts for future cooking tools. Using user input to drive concepts generated by a multidisciplinary team, this study hopes to design better, more useful, usable and desirable cooking tools