Week 6
Design problem
"In what way might I reduce heat around the stove area for a more enjoyable cooking process"
I love to cook. However one of the most difficult aspects of cooking (and more so with indian cooking) is the heat around the cooking stove. It gets hot and sweaty and exhausts only manage 30-50% of the heat but the rest is still quite bad – especially given the humid climate. A mechanism to reduce/manage this heat would make the cooking process more enjoyable.
With this gap in mind I have gone through the last few weeks of evolution
Design Direction:
I developed different concepts broadly with following directions
- Retain heat better within the stove area
- Isolate user from the heat
- Remove heat from the stove area better (improved exhaust mechanism)
Based on Scoring matrix and my user prototype feedback in week 5, I had committed to the design direction of the following concept that is a mix of better heat retention and user isolation
I made a few initial prototypes in week 5 for getting initial user feedback. Post this below is my Alpha prototype
Alpha Prototype
Below are images of my Alpha prototype.
Given that i am in a sales job and have intensive travel 6 days a week, I am pretty glad i could turn this around on Sunday morning... phew!
The heat retention ring was created by a metal lamp shade. I cut open the lamp shade which was conical in shape and placed in on top of the burner. Given the sharp edges of the lamp shade I had to find a workshop with right tools that would help me in doing this.
For the Air Curtain I could not find any suitable high pressure Air Pump. I then decided to repurpose the blower function in my vaccuum cleaner.
REfinements
User Feedback: I am separating the user feedback into 2 parts of the design:
1. Heat Retention Ring:
A. Distance between flame and Utensil: Users find the utensil being too far away from flame due to the ring.
The ring gets placed on top of the clamps where the utensil normally would have got placed. This raises the height of the utensil further and it goes a bit far away from the flame
Refinement: Create notches on the side of the ring that can go inside the clamps
B. Visibility of flame : The users cannot see the flame due to the ring.
Due to the ring being Opaque, users are not able to see the flame. Hence they need to keep the vessel off the ring and then light the burner, and post that keep the vessel on the ring. This may have convenience and safety implication
Refinement: I think this feedback has given a brilliant idea. The idea is to create the ring in a tempered glass material. This would not just provide visibility, but would be amazing from a aesthetic perspective as well (lots of glosss!!)
The only difficulty would be to be able to create a beta prototype for the same with having glass blowing equipment. But thats for next week!
2. Air Curtain
This has been my personal favourite idea ( i just thought it was too cool). The alpha prototype worked just about fine as well (though i cannot show an air curtain through images).
However the biggest concern on the feedback has been the noise of the blower. This is something that users find highly inconvenient. IN my search in the market i had found a few options to the vaccuum cleaner of smaller blowers - specifically and electromagnetic air pump and the other idea was to use the blower used in hair dryers.
However both of these options also created an equal amount of noise.
Moreover users were very excited about hte heat retention ring and found it to be adequate enough for retaining a large amount of the heat. I made 2 prototypes that was used by 2 users for a prolonged time and they found it to be highly effective.
Hence based on the user feedback i have decided to let go of the air curtain in the final prototype and use the heat retention ring only.
Product Logo
Well this is not part of the assignment, but i thought of this logo for the final product and putting it here for your feedback. :)
- The ring shows the product
- The fire inside the solid ring shows safety and retention of heat
- The star on the top right of the ring is the gloss that indicates that it would be made of glass ;)
