So far, most of the research in domestic

By admin on October 31st, 2007

So far, most of the research in domestic technology has focused
on making the environment aware of the context: this requires
definition and description of parameters, assessment of their
relevance, interpretation of sensed data and design of relative
system reactions. In a certain sense, environment and users
have been loaded with sensors in order to make the system
knowledgeable about the context. It remains an open issue
though how to make users aware and knowledgeable of the
hybrid context in which they interact. And, furthermore, how to
make designers knowledgeable about the complexity of the
hybrid contexts of interaction for which they design.
Interior and product designers, as well as ergonomists, have
been working on the kitchen in terms of space and artefacts for
some time; the design of affordances for digital information
embedded in a real physical environment implies the
consideration of new aspects which differ from the desktop PC
environment. The users possibility to move around in the space
and to directly manipulate objects and information items needs
to be supported by interfaces that are properly scaled to users
metrics, locations in the space, reciprocal distance among users
and motor capabilities. Issues such as the height of the user, her
visual angle, the reachability of displayed objects to the hands,
the proportion between objects and hands sizes, environmental
factors such as sound, smoke, heat, assume an important role.
In order to face such issues, ergonomic considerations need to
be included in the interface design, thus suggesting the
emergence of a novel design approach. The traditional
usability guidelines for visual displays will most likely need to
be revised in order to address the novel aspects brought by
ubiquitous computing. In these scenarios I expect that the
design discipline will need to merge screen and product design
competences, in order to merge virtual and physical worlds.
Furthermore, the design of experiences that build on social
relationships and imply social contexts needs to find novel
approaches to prototype, test and assess such experiences. In
this sense the tight collaboration of design research with
behavioural sciences promises to provide novel methods for
experience simulation and assessment: such assessment should
focus on a short, as well as on a longer time perspective.

OBSERVATIONS AND LESSONS LEARNED The discussions of the

By admin on October 31st, 2007

OBSERVATIONS AND LESSONS LEARNED

The discussions of the first phase were useful to identify the
requirements that could improve the application and the user
interface. We noticed that the playback of the video in playback
mode is more entertaining when two people recorded a recipe
together rather than a single one. When a single user is
recording a recipe, it can happen that she forgets to mention a
step. When two people cook together, the spontaneous
conversation among the two of them, such as Can you please
pass me the cheese? or Can you turn down the fire? helps to
keep track of the process. It also creates a more fun experience
for the users that are recording as they often end up in jokes or
small talks about the recipe. The feeling of a natural social
setting makes the whole cooking session more interesting for
the user who plays the video back and the personalization of
content is much stronger. For this reason, after the first test, we
agreed on the protocol to cook with two people in all further
tests.
Given that cooks are already managing a set of tools, we
observed that the manipulation of an additional one, i.e., the
pen, soon became inconvenient, especially when it was
misplaced on the kitchen counter as it happens with cooking
tools. After this observation in the first tests, the pen was
hanged with a piece of string next to the display, so as to
support more casual use.
We also noticed that more than one camera would better
capture the whole event. A closer look at commercial TV
cooking shows revealed that they use up to seven distinct
camera positions. Indeed it is important to have a close view at
the location where the food is actually prepared (e.g. the fire
and the counter), as well as on the face and movements of the
person who is cooking, in order to keep the desired sense of
presence.
The cognitive walkthrough tests with users from outside of the
project team gave us some useful insight both on the usability
of the interface as well as on the whole experience. To this
respect it became clear the difficulty to evaluate experiences in
a hybrid context, in an environment which is supposed to
recreate an everyday life one, but is actually still far from the
intimacy and acquaintance people have in their own real
domestic environments. Even though some testers were
employees of the lab and know the environment of this specific
kitchen, the activities they normally perform there are different
from proper cooking: e.g. coffee preparation, food warm-up,
food storage. When both the employees and the external testers
were asked to use the application and to cook there, we noticed
that a certain stress was generated by the pure fact of cooking
in an unfamiliar kitchen, using the interface, talking aloud or
observing a video, and, in the cognitive walkthrough, being
observed by a researcher. Some users, in particular, were most
concerned about the result of their cooking, being aware that
the team would taste it afterwards. Thus, the feedback they
provided was mostly focused on this aspect rather than the
whole experience of using the application and how this could
affect their mundane activities.
In these tests we realized that for the assessment of the whole
experience and of its social meaning it would be necessary to
let users try the application in their own kitchens they feel
familiar with. Furthermore, the expected increase in motivation
due to social relationships needs to be validated in a more
intimate social setting. One of the testers explicitly asked to
have the video of his cooking session to show it to his
girlfriend.
Therefore we plan to connect different
kitchens/cooks that have a real familiar relationship.

TESTS IN THE KITCHEN The technical setup and

By admin on October 30th, 2007

TESTS IN THE KITCHEN

The technical setup and the user tests of the appliance took
place in the small kitchen of our lab. The design of the interface
underwent an iterative process. In an early stage of
development 4 members of the design and development team
tested the application with real cooking sessions. Two of them
recorded recipes, and the other two played them back.
Considering that the cooking activity was more or less familiar
to everyone, it made sense to directly involve ourselves in the
test, so as to have a first hand experience. Everyone, indeed,
has her personal way to deal with household activities, which
justifies the direct involvement of team members. These
sessions were concluded by 4 meals in which the team dined
and discussed the application, improvements to be done on the
interface, changes in the setting of the camera and projector,
and the experience delivered by the application.
In a second phase 4 people from outside of the team, 2 men and
2 women at the age of 22 to 45, were invited to test the
application. In this phase a cognitive walkthrough method was
adopted, so as to evaluate the user interface. Testers were given
some tasks and were asked to report and talk aloud when they
did not understand what to do, or encountered any difficulty.
These tests also ended up in meals and discussions, jointly with
the team members: in this setting the discussion addressed both
the User Interface (e.g. whether it was clear how to interact),
and the whole experience (e.g. how they felt about recording or
playing a video of a personal cooking session). During the meal
together with the team, testers were invited to present their
impressions of the application, to think whether they would use
it in their homes, and how it could be improved or done
differently.

THE LIVING COOKBOOK The Living Cookbook aims to

By admin on October 30th, 2007

THE LIVING COOKBOOK

The Living Cookbook aims to cultivate communication and
collaboration in the kitchen by making people s cooking
experiences recordable and shareable in an interactive digital
cookbook. The goal is to preserve cultural and social roots on
the one hand, and stimulate cultural and generational
fertilization on the other. Instead of simply exchanging written
instructions, we capture the whole cooking process with
annotated audio and video and make it available for others so
that they can asynchronously reproduce the dish. When users
give instructions for a recipe, they author a multimedia
cookbook. We therefore rely on people s interest in
communication and story telling, as they are turned into actors
of a participatory theater, who interact with their audience via
technology.
The emotional quality of content created by family members or
intimate friends is expected to be very different in comparison
to the cooking sessions broadcasted on TV shows for a large
audience. This aspect promises to affect motivation and
engagement. People can customize each recipe with personal
tips and tricks, make explicit reference to their well known
target users, and thereby create a very personal experience.
The User Interface of the Living Cookbook is a client
application running on a tablet PC mounted on a kitchen
cabinet. It is implemented in Macromedia Flash and connected
to a server implemented in Java, which in turn controls a
camera for recording video, and a video projector for playing
back the video. Via the client interface a user can insert new
recipes, choose already inserted recipes and control video
recording and playback. The video is projected onto a wall
above the counter in order to provide a good view and still keep
the counter clear of devices. The content of the cookbook is
stored in an XML File on the server side. Video material is
referenced externally from the server s file system. Another
XML file stored on the server side defines all ingredients
including appropriate ranges and units.
Considering that the cooking activity requires extensive manual
work we tried to minimize users gesture based input. Given
that mouse and keyboard are obviously not suitable for kitchen
environments, we chose a touch screen display which can be
controlled by a pen or a finger. Since hands are often dirty
while cooking, the interface design privileged the use of a pen.
This means, for example, that the interactive elements of the
GUI have a size which is more suitable for the tip of a pen,
although interaction with a finger is still possible. Furthermore,
this implies that the user interface provides affordances for
direct manipulation with dragging whenever it makes sense
(e.g., to set a value for the quantity of an ingredient). Our goal
was to minimize the use of the virtual keyboard, which can be
displayed and tipped on the screen of the tablet PC (for entering
the name of the recipe, for example). Opening the virtual
keyboard, entering text by tipping character, and then closing
the keyboard pane is indeed a rather cumbersome activity:
additionally, it implies that the real estate of the display is
halved during the use of the keyboard.

TECHNOLOGY IN THE KITCHEN In the kitchen we

By admin on October 29th, 2007

TECHNOLOGY IN THE KITCHEN

In the kitchen we can traditionally find a diverse range of
artifacts for food preparation. These include very specific as
involving rituals and symbolic aspects. Some people enjoy
cooking together; several people enjoy cooking for others;
friends and relatives often exchange recipes, which assume a
cultural as well as communicative value. TV cooking shows,
featuring popular cooks or showmen, frame cooking as a
creative and cultural activity. In this sense cooking seems to
provide a great potential for communication. Thus
communication and display technologies can support the
communication and sociability aspects of cooking, and bring
new aspects to its social character.

Our daily life environments are starting to contain

By admin on October 29th, 2007

Our daily life environments are starting to contain an increasing
number of displays in various formats and supporting different
functionalities and interaction styles.
In such interactive environments people can move around in a display continuum
rather then sit at a desktop behind their screens, handle physical
as well as digital objects at the same time, and interact on
shared displays in co-located or remote collaboration. Thus, our
contexts of interaction tend to get a more and more hybrid
nature, where physical and digital artifacts blend together. This
will most likely affect the way in which we interact with
architectural space, with information and with each other in the
near future. A holistic understanding of context, in this sense,
requires looking at interaction as embodied [3], thus taking into
account its social as well as physical aspects. Hybrid IT
artifacts need to provide physical, cognitive, as well as social
affordances in order to enable users to interact
and communicate in such hybrid contexts.

The research focuses on the design of affordances for digital
information in scenarios of ubiquitous computing. Here I
present the Living Cookbook appliance: in this project we
explore the introduction of digital display technology into the
kitchen environment. In this paper I look at the complexity of
the cooking context and I consider how the introduction of
technology in the kitchen can affect the cooking experience. I
provide a design perspective and point out the main challenges
and potentials of bringing computing technology into contexts
of everyday life.

This site describes using dispersed task-specific annotation to

By admin on October 28th, 2007

This site describes using dispersed task-specific
annotation to make information available throughout a
kitchen. We present digital information on walls,
countertops, tables, appliances, the floor and water itself.
The resulting annotated space can help people to
collaborate, to work more efficiently and to avoid accidents.
The appliance and kitchen design industries have been
working to use appliances to communicate with each other
and with users. Our approach is to annotate the entire
kitchen space for the many purposes that were not designed
to be contemporaneous but often are. This paper promotes
the possibility and value of using cameras and projectors to
make total interfaces from traditional kitchen spaces.
The use of the physical world as a user interface is
becoming a reality. Inexpensive hardware can now be
utilized to react to where people are and what they are
doing. Such context-aware use of sensors and effectors
to model tasks and augment performance is becoming more
and more possible.

Information Annotation of Kitchen would be even more

By admin on October 28th, 2007

Information Annotation of Kitchen would be even more
helpful if it could respond automatically to events before
and during their occurrence. For example, before we try to
open a hot pot, it should tell the temperature of the pot and
record our body and hand positions.
In the Spatial Definition system, we have suggested a
solution to better describe the spatial events of the kitchen.
We only use the spatial regions as virtual buttons, pressed
or released to trigger events. Once the system can
accurately judge the activites being performed, it will be
able to automatically deliver useful information. In the
future, we will use a thermal imaging camera to better
recognize human activities and monitor temperatures
throughout the kitchen.

The pervasive virtual world is becoming an important

By admin on October 27th, 2007

The pervasive virtual world is becoming an important part
of our lives. Unfortunately, we are only able to look at
information in books or on computer monitors. Computers,
projectors and video cameras have become sufficiently
affordable to allow for vision recognition and projection on
all the available surfaces of a space. These systems can
improve productivity and reduce the need for books and
portable computers, as well as allowing for more free space.
All five of the interfaces discussed were presented at the
Things That Think consortium meeting at the MIT Media
Laboratory in October 2003.
These interfaces stand to be considerably improved.
Information Table currently has only two modes:
countertop and dining table. Considering the numerous
functions possible on a work surface in a kitchen, the
system can only gain richness by being conceived for
additional uses.

Selecting appliances for your new kitchen can be

By admin on October 27th, 2007

Selecting appliances for your new kitchen can be thrilling and challenging at the
same time. There s so much information, so many options and ultimately,
it s your decision, but there s a wealth of resources at your fingertips to
help you. The internet, a professional designer and appliance expert will
be your key influencers.
The exciting part of building a new kitchen is learning about the newest
trends and technological advancements that are being made in cooking
equipment. Opportunities present themselves in a showroom environ-
ment to try out new appliances such as ovens, cooktops, and dishwash-
ers. Look for hands-on programs that will familiarize you with the nuances
of the latest appliances. It will help you make informed decisions about
the right appliances for you, not to mention, the experience will heighten
anticipation of cooking your first gourmet dinner!
Before you begin, set a budget for your project and create a line item
for just the appliance package. At a minimum for a complete kitchen
remodel, this should include a cooktop and oven (or range); hood, refrig-
erator, microwave, sink, faucet and dishwasher. Not gone, but improved
upon, are the range and ovens offering high powered professional series
accessories such as wok burners, griddles and grills, steam assist ovens,
and induction cooktops. Food preservation and kitchen clean-up offer
under-counter, roll out drawers, roll out microwave ovens, wine storage
systems for the kitchen and entertaining area. Your options really are vast,
and awe-inspiring!