What it is

Cooking Naturally aims to change people’s use of food resources, reducing waste by creating a direct channel between people and the information cloud surrounding the theme.

All, a kitchen device that allows a better exploitation of this information, is both a display appliance and a filter which adapts its behavior according to the user’s habits.

It is designed for people living in shared accommodation or alone. Due to their living conditions and lifestyles, and to how food is currently distributed and sold, these are the categories most exposed to food waste.

Through All, such people can receive advice on grocery shopping and food conservation, preparation and consumption. As it is used, All learns to recognize its users, improving the advice depending on each individual’s behavior.

All is used in the kitchen during food preparation and consumption. It can recognize the person using it and understand words and gestures. All integrates itself in the habitual dynamics of this environment. Making people concentrate on normal tasks, like preparing a recipe or conserving food, it becomes a tool that improves the experience of responsible cooking, not the focus of the experience.

Research

Concept

This project’s aim is to generate behaviour change in the management of food, reducing waste by analysing the user’s living environment and cooking habits.

 

Objective

The main objective is to reduce food waste: every year we throw away the 40% of food present in the house.

 

Strategy

The strategy behind All is to design a product able to connect the end user to the huge amount of valuable information around food consumption available online.
In the last few years the topic of food consumption, waste, and planning of cooking activities has been the subject of various publications available on and off-line. All could be one of the ways to understand how people behave in the kitchen and provide a sensible guidance to reduce food waste at home.

 

Users

All is designed to cater for people living in a house share: they are more mobile, find a limited offer on the supermarket’s shelves and perhaps have less time to plan their grocery shopping carefully, therefore they tend to waste more than a family.

Features

All connects people with the cloud of information relating to not waste food. All attempts to create a sense of belonging to these communities, trying to give people who use it, the motivation to improve their behavior.

Provides in over consumer tips, according to the basis of certain criteria such as the date of expiration of the food, the type of food, time, season and the place where you are. To make sure that people consume fresh food when it is far from its decay, and the recommendations are appropriate to people.

All is a tool allowing users to to manage their grocery shopping. All provides an analog, paper-based inventory of the items present in the kitchen and helps the people sharing the kitchen to plan their next move in an effective way.

With All you can print a small paper inventory of food in the house, to help people to draw up a shopping list and avoid the tenants of the same house, a strict division of space.

 

How does it work

All’s favorite space is the kitchen, Dario (user) places it on the kitchen’s worktop where it can get a full picture of the whole room. Once plugged in, All introduces itself to its user and explains its role in the kitchen with natural language. It also explains him how to interact with it, Dario needs to give directions and add “All” at the end of each command.
All would then display a message on screen: My name’s All, what’s your name?
And Dario replies: “My name’s Dario, All”
From now on All will recognize Dario’s commands.
After this short on boarding process, All asks Dario to let it know when the next grocery shopping would be done.
Dario comes back home with his grocery and lets All know about it: I’ve done the grocery, All.
All feeds back with a beeping sound. An empty shopping cart appears on its screen.
In order to tell All exactly how many and which items he bought, Dario lays them on the kitchen worktop where it can read its information by scanning the items’ barcodes or simply their shapes and colors (e.g.: loose vegetables).
All then processes the collected information and determines the products’ expiry date.
If Dario wanted to edit the preservation method (e.g.: he wants to freeze the fresh green beans) he would select the item from All’s screen and override its expiry date manually.
Finally Dario can store all items without giving any further command. By simply removing all items from the device’s view, All would know that its registration task is completed.
Right before lunch or dinner time All will tell Dario which items to consume first, according to their expiration date; throughout the day it would inform Dario of appropriate preservation methods for the current season.

Cooking naturally publication

Check out my thesis pubblication for more details, like 3d modeling, graphics, gestures instruction.