THE CASE
Magic Glove is a smart kitchen glove, that reduces the complexity of the modern kitchen environment. It optimizes the functionality of the hand as an ideal tool and integrates the human intuitively into the network of devices.
Winner of the Siemens Home Appliances Design Award 2018 (second place).
Why less is more:
Nowhere else in our households we have as many appliances and tools as in the kitchen. This fact results in a high degree of complexity.
MISSING STORAGE
In addition to the large kitchen appliances, there is also a variety of smaller tools. Limited storage is already a problem. This will become even bigger in the future when space for living continues to shrink.
ONE GLOVE – MULTIPLE FUNCTIONS
The intuitive handling of the Magic Glove makes it possible to summarize the functionality of several smaller devices (such as kitchen scale, egg timer, thermometer, etc.) in one.
The perfect tool:
As a result of years of evolution, our hand has become a perfect tool. It is precise and sensitive. Magic Gloves picks up those abilities and optimizes the hand for the kitchen environment.
CUT INJURIES
Most accidents happen in the household. The danger of injuries when cutting is particularly in the kitchen very high.
CUT PROTECTION
With it’s cut protection material Magic Glove allows fast and safe handling of food and precise cutting.
BURN INJURIES
Our body is extremely sensitive to extreme temperatures. That’s why we rely on impractical aids.
HEAT PROTECTION
Despite the light wearing comfort, Magic Glove protects against extreme temperatures. This allows a smooth workflow.
Your hand becomes smarter:
The hand is our interface with devices and cooking ingredients. Magic Glove uses these touch points to automatically capture a wealth of information using smart sensoric.
FOOD WASTE
If we throw food into waste, valueable resources are unnecessarily stressed. This has far-reaching effects on humans and nature.
FOOD SAVING
Magic Glove gives the user information about the condition of the food, because many "expired" foods are still edible.
MANY MOVEMENTS
The handling of the devices doesn’t integrates smoothly into the cooking process. The user has to interrupt his workflow for unnecessary ways and movements.
GESTURE CONTROL
Gestures are our most natural way of communicating. So the user can interact intuitively with devices. Magic Glove becomes the overall digital interface in the kitchen.
LACK OF INFORMATION
Healthy nutrition – which is essential if you want to remain efficient in the long term – requires time consuming research on ingredients and their optimal preparation.
HEALTHY = EASY
Magic Glove supplies the User with all the relevant nutrition information and adjusts devices for preparation automatically. This transforms the glove intro a discreet assistant.
Why cooking will never be outdated:
Despite the time constraints, cooking has a tremendous significance in our society and it continues to rise with the future trend towards greater individuality.
A completely new cooking experience:
PROTOTYPING & TESTING
We tried cooking with different glove types to get a feeling for the new cooking experience. We gathered valuable information which disadvantages we have to consider when designing Magic Glove and which advantages we can simply provide the user.
Because the hand is an unusual surface for a display we created paper prototypes to evaluate variable positionings and layouts.
FUNCTIONAL PROTOTYPING
We used flex-sensors and an accelerometer to build a glove that is usable for gesture control.We also prototyped the weighing function in the hand palm. Because the hand isn’t a stable surface force resistant sensors are more suitable for our requirements than normal load cells. To keep the glove comfortable we chose a very flexible sensor that adapts to the movement of the hands. After some adjustments we were able to receive usefull data.
USER INTERFACE
When designing the user interface the most important thing to keep in mind was that the relevant information has to be visible from every angle, because the hand is turning during cooking. Our solution is a moving display that is either visible on the back of the hand or on a bracelet around the wrist.
CONTEXT
The project was developed for the Siemens Home Appliances Design Award 2018 under the guidence of Matthias Edler-Golla and Florian Petri. I worked in collaboration with Melanie Pfnür, Katja Niggl, Anja Lietzau and Sabrina Reischl.
TIME SPAN
October 2017 - January 2018
© Verena Pues 2018
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